On sidelines of Miami Art Week, Opera Gallery show explores how artists use color

As the international art crowd descends on Florida for Art Basel, Opera Gallery is using its Miami outpost to highlight how artists across eras use color to shape meaning.

The exhibition “In Dialogue with Color: Mid-20th Century to Now” runs through January 5 and gathers eight decades of works —from Claude Monet to Andy Warhol, and from Anish Kapoor to Amoako Boafo—to examine how artists wield color as a tool of expression.

“It's such an open-ended topic, obviously, but we wanted to start a conversation around the ways color is used to express personal emotions and identity in their own way,” Opera Gallery spokesman Katherine McMahon told Urgent Matter.

“That would be anything from Keith Haring being influenced by orange street signs in New York, and using that in his work, to Chagall using greens and blues in that dreamlike, ethereal way that he does.”

McMahon said the show underscores how color takes on different meanings for each artist. Pierre Soulages used black to explore how light interacts with darkness, while Ghanaian painter Boafo’s Embrace places two Black figures against a stark white background to frame Blackness as cultural identity and pride.

The gallery organized the exhibition by color—green, blue, red, black and white, pink and orange—with works spanning from figurative painting to abstract sculpture. The breadth, McMahon said, gives it a “greatest hits” quality and “something for everyone.”

The show doesn’t attempt a deep art-historical excavation of any single color. Recent museum exhibitions, including presentations at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Nassau County Museum of Art, have focused exclusively on red. But McMahon said Opera Gallery’s broader approach benefits from not being restricted to one hue.

Opera Gallery will also have a booth at Art Miami that McMahon said shares some overlap with the gallery exhibition. “I wouldn't say it's directly thematically tied to the show,” she said. “But it does feature a few of the same artists and has a nice mix of contemporary and more established artists.”

The Miami show follows recent programming at Opera Gallery’s other international locations that also touched on color.

Opera Gallery Dubai last month closed a Thomas Dillon exhibition defined by bold greens, crimsons, blues and ochres applied in layered, gestural strokes. Opera Gallery Paris recently closed a Jean Dubuffet show examining the artist’s shift from earthy browns and chalky whites in early textured works to the bold, limited palette seen later in his career.

“What's interesting about this show is that it’s celebrating the specific individual colors, but also how colors interact with one another, whether that's in contrast to each other or mixed together to create something totally new,” she said.

“And so, in a way, it's sort of like this obvious thing, like, of course color is going to be an important part of any artist's oeuvre and what they're trying to say. But I think we wanted to make a space to kind of talk about and have that conversation.”