Gallery Artists | A Deeper Shade of Blue

Of all the fixtures of the artist’s palette, blue is the most chimerical: a product of unchecked human imagination, the earliest blues—frit, woad, indigo and ultramarine—were borne of humanity's shared desire to grasp the likeness of the sea and sky.

These first mineral pigments and vegetable dyes were coaxed from the world like blood from stone, a rare natural occurrence, shades of blue were extracted from the leaves and roots of plants, alchemized from sand into glass, and drawn from veins of blue more precious than gold.

The third of the primary colours, blue is a prevalent favourite around the world. Both muse and material for artists since time immemorial, the colour, in its various forms, has heavily saturated the canon and lexicon of art history, from Gainsborough's Blue Boy, Picasso's famous "Blue Period", and Matisse's Blue Nude, to "Der Blaue Reiter", Les Bluets by Joan Mitchell, and International Klein Blue.

A Deeper Shade of Blue, a curated exhibition of selected work by gallery artists, on view this July at Bau-Xi Vancouver, invites artists and viewers alike to engage with the fascinating psychological, emotional and environmental qualities attributed to the depths of the colour blue.

VIEW THE COLLECTION