Rivane Neuenschwander, Cao Guimarães, Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue 2006. Tate. © Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimarães.
What colours do you associate with festivals or celebrations?
The Start display shows art from a range of countries, cultures and times, linked by a focus on colour. The film in this first room shows red and black ants carry coloured confetti across the floor of the Brazilian rainforest. The brightly coloured discs contrast with the brown tones of the earth.
The title of the film translates as ‘Ash Wednesday’, the day marking the start of the Christian season of Lent. This is a forty-day period of fasting before Easter. It is also the last day of the Brazilian carnival festival, when colourful confetti is thrown in the streets. Perhaps the ants are tidying up after the end of the festival.
The film tries to capture the mood of the end of the festival, when there is a certain melancholy after the days of madness and excess.
Rivane Neuenschwander.
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych 1962
Warhol made his first paintings of Marilyn Monroe soon after the actor died of a drug overdose on 5 August 1962. Warhol used a publicity photo for her 1953 film Niagara as the source image. The use of two contrasting canvases for Marilyn Diptych illustrates the contrast between the public life of the star, who at the time was one of the most famous women alive, and her private self. This was not necessarily Warhol’s intention. He created this work when the art collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine visited Warhol’s home. They suggested that two canvases he had already made be presented as a diptych, to which Warhol responded, ‘gee whiz yes’.
Gallery label, August 2020
1/1
artworks in Colour
Art in this room
Andy Warhol
Marilyn Diptych
1962