Warm

The 19th century French painter Eugène Delacroix once said that ‘everybody knows that yellow, orange and red induce and represent ideas of joy and of riches.’ In business, however, research shows that combinations of red and yellow, popular amongst the fast food industry, are known to convey a sense of urgency and incite hunger. There are many theories about the way colours are thought to produce certain reactions in viewers. Different cultures also place different associations on particular colours.

The exhibition Warm offers a selection of abstract works from the TarraWarra Museum of Art collection that span the last five decades of Australian art and demonstrate varied uses of colour with a focus on the colours considered to suggest warmth: yellows, reds and oranges. Warm colours can be used to create space in a pictorial surface, or communicate a feeling and ambience. Warm invites the viewer to make their own observations and explore their own reactions to the colours used by the artists in these diverse abstract paintings.