Meeting Point 06: Contemporary Art Museum ‘Constantin Xenakis’
Constantin Xenakis, Alchemy B’, 1999
Gouache, 13 x 36 cm, Donation of C. Xenakis, Contemporary Art Museum ‘Constantin Xenakis’
Creative Audio Description MP06 (/ - x)
Creative description
The artwork “Alchemy B” by Constantin Xenakis is a painting composition dating back to 1999. It measures slightly smaller than a standard sheet of paper and was created using a type of watercolour (gouache) on paper.
The composition is divided into three horizontal sections. Against a vivid green background, repetitive black shapes reminiscent of chemical laboratory instruments, alongside smaller red patterns reminiscent of road signs appear. These include tiny triangular, circular, and diamond-shaped road signs, spherical flasks, rectangular beakers, conical funnels, elongated tubes, and other containers commonly employed in chemical laboratories to mix or separate liquids and solids. Abstract symbols are densely repeated across the surface of the artwork, with slight variations in each zone.
Most elements in the upper part of the composition are depicted in relief, such as a spherical bottle with a long neck, a rectangular bottle, a conical funnel, and abstract geometric motifs. Geometric signs and lines in small scale are depicted in relief below. The larger symbols in relief are repeated in the middle and lower sections, with the artist’s signature in low relief at the bottom left.
The combination of the green background with the black and red symbols creates striking colour contrasts, offering critical commentary on science and communication, or the lack thereof, due to the overabundance of information in contemporary culture. The elements found in “Alchemy B” frequently recur in Xenakis’s visual oeuvre, as he describes it, “composing his own writing, a personal visual alphabet.” Symbols from Egyptian, Arabic, and Greek culture are amalgamated with road signs and scientific objects, forming his personal art of signs that appears in many of his visual compositions from the 1960s onwards.
Photos from Meeting Point 06: Contemporary Art Museum ‘Constantin Xenakis’
The creative description of the artwork “Alchemy B’” by Constantin Xenakis is the result of co-creation by the participants in Meeting Point 06: Contemporary Art Museum ‘Constantin Xenakis’.
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