As part of its programming for the upcoming Frieze Los Angeles fair, Hauser & Wirth will restage David Hammons’s iconic work Concerto in Black and Blue (2002) for the first time since its debut more than 20 years ago.
The only time Concerto in Black and Blue has ever been realized was in 2002 at Ace Gallery in New York. (At the time, it was the artist’s first show in New York in a decade.) Upon arrival, visitors were given blue-light flashlights to navigate 20,000 square feet of space. That space, which had 25-foot-high ceilings, was presented completely dark.
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As artist Glenn Ligon recalled in a 2004 Artforum article on Hammons, “And what was in that twenty-thousand-square-foot space? Nothing. It was completely empty except for the blue light emitted from your flashlight and from those of other people walking around in the space with you.”
Ligon added, “You went into the show looking for the art, but you came out having been the art. What’s there is what we bring to the space. … What was black about Concerto in Black and Blue is whatever you think blackness is, whatever you brought to it, and what you did with what you brought when you got there.”
In the two decades since, Concerto in Black and Blue has become legendary. Art historian Darby English opened his 2007 book, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, with a detailed reading of Concerto, writing “How to see a work of art in total darkness? One cannot, of course, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, such as when darkness itself forms the basis of the work`s visibility.” In a 2023 T Magazine article on 15 New York gallery shows that altered contemporary art, art historian Sarah Lewis recalled that the work’s staging, just over a year after 9/11 and not far from Ground Zero, “offered new ways of being in a society that, after that tragedy, was really grasping in the dark.”
The last time Hauser & Wirth collaborated with Hammons was in 2019 for an exhibition, also at its downtown LA space, that was one of the largest gatherings of work by Hammons ever mounted. (The gallery’s publishing arm is publishing a post-exhibition catalog on the show this coming May.)
Concerto in Black and Blue will take over the two north galleries in Hauser & Wirth’s sprawling downtown LA location. The exhibition will run from February 18 until June 1. As is often the case with a Hammons exhibition, no press release or description accompanies the upcoming Hauser & Wirth show.