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It’s more than just a colour—it’s a piece of history documented in a pigment that has travelled all the way from a laboratory in Berlin in 1704, to canvases and built surfaces, and now, finally, to a survey exhibition being held at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Noida. Titled “Prussian Blue: A Serendipitous Colour that Altered the Trajectory of Art,” the exhibition—curated by Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala—features 19 contemporary artists who responded to the prompt in ways unique to their idioms and practices.
The Mumbai-based gallerist, curator and academic, Lokhandwala’s father had a paint factory, and growing up, she had seen him engage with prussian blue in a host of different ways—through the manufacturing of industrial paint in the shade, having conversations about it with his daughter, and even donning a pair of trousers in the colour. “I was looking for a way to remember my father, Mansoor Lokhandwala. So I gave the artists prompts based on the colour, for the exhibition. Blue is also a colour of loss and mourning, so it resonated and connected with me—it’s a dark colour. A lot of people ask me if it's indigo, and I tell them it’s not because indigo also stands for completely different things,” Lokhandwala says.
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Her relation to the colour, in fact, has far deeper roots. Lokhandwala’s father, before starting his own journey with paints, lived in Berlin—the colour’s birthplace—for a while to do an internship. Prussian blue, therefore, is unsurprisingly also called Berlienr Blau due to its geographic origins, and because the Prussian army also dyed its soldiers’ jackets with the colour.
The title of the exhibition reveals why it lays emphasis on its historicity—it’s because the colour was exceptional, and more than just a naturally found miracle of nature. In several ways, Prussian blue changed the course of history after two German chemists, Jacob Diesbach and Johann Konrad Dippel, accidentally created a batch of cochineal red (made from bugs) that mistakenly used potash contaminated by (the iron in) animal blood that turned the mixture a deep shade of blue. It instantly became a sensation on account of its colourfast nature, and affordability.
Thereafter, its fame travelled fast and wide, with artists like the Japanese icon Katsushika Hokusai and Vincent Van Gogh turning patrons of the hue. A component of the pigment is cyanide—a poisonous substance that lends it its depth and heft in more ways than one, and which ultimately urged Lokhandwala to contemplate its varied meanings beyond the obvious ones. This dichotomy that underscores the colour is torn between the melancholy it hides underneath the toxins that birth it. As a result, artists displaying at the show have reacted to the colour’s inherent toxicology and how it triumphs it to form an identity of its own.
“Different artists have unpacked the aspect of toxicity in different ways. For example, how big pharma is trying to sell its things to us that might contain toxins. Or even Thukral & Tagra, who have talked about the farmer suicides happening in Punjab every 40 minutes, so there’s Prussian blue ink being shot every 40 minutes. So, by the end of the show, you can count the number of farmers who may have died,” she says.
There’s Prajakta Potnis’s larger-than-life photographic work signalling an apocalypse through the illustration of water dripping on a bar of Rin detergent soap, an industrial grade cleanser, harsh in its composition and chipping away at the tenderness of the Earth. There are installations too, by artists like Astha Butail and Alka Reeh, who unpack the transcendental nature of the colour that stirs an introspection within the onlooker. There are mirrors and skies, and the viewer in between these layers of blue. There’s also NS Harsha’s Andar Baahar that dwells on the paradoxes of our inner and outer lives, captured in notes of blue. In Pakistani artist Waqas Khan’s artwork, a contemplation on Sufism and how its webbed to the universe at large can be seen.
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And then there is Mithu Sen, “whose work is always questioning boundaries,” Lokhandwala says. For this exhibition, she responded to the prompt with a painting that was entirely devoid of blue. “It’s talking about a phobia of a colour, where it’s made invisible. She creates a paradoxical response, which she does with many of her works,” the curator says.
It’s the first ever survey show interrogating the connotations and history of Prussian blue, and it poignantly unpacks the various layers that exist within a single colour from a less-spoken chapter in history.
Artists on display: Anita Dube, Anju Dodiya, Alke Reeh, Astha Butail, Atul Dodiya, Desmond Lazaro, Mithu Sen, N S Harsha, Sheba Chhachhi, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Parul Gupta, Prajakta Potnis, Ranbir Kaleka, Sumakshi Singh, Shambhavi, Thukral & Tagra, Vivan Sundaram, Waqas Khan.
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