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.
Batchelor's I Love King's Cross and King's Cross Loves Me (1997-2009) consists of acrylic panels painted with bright enamel and fixed to small warehouse dollies that can be arranged in numerous configurations. His Concreto sculptures set vividly coloured found objects, from shards of coloured glass to studio offcuts and Perspex, into blocks of concrete, while Magic Hour (2004-07) fills a darkened room with coloured light from salvaged commercial lightboxes inspired by London's streets after dark. Since 1997 he has also photographed blank billboards, sun-bleached posters and other white surfaces in cities for his ongoing series Found Monochromes.
In “My Own Private Bauhaus” at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, in 2019, he used the Bauhaus movement's centenary as a starting point, working with deliberately damaged and imperfect materials such as plastic offcuts, glass shards, tin tops, timber and concrete.A 2022 survey at Compton Verney, “Colour Is”, covered more than 40 years of his work across sculpture, painting, drawing and video.
