David Batchelor (Scottish, b. 1955) is an artist and writer whose sculpture, painting, video and drawing explore the cultural status of colour, a subject he has pursued since the early 1990s. His 2000 book Chromophobia argues that Western culture has long treated colour as something to be purged, associating it with corruption, impurity and the “sinful” feminine.
In his own words, “Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge color from culture, to devalue color, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity”. The book's ideas provided the curatorial premise for “Chromophobia”, a 2015 group exhibition at Gagosian in Geneva bringing together artists who eschew colour in favour of black, white and unpainted materials.
