“Yes, I can draw it this way,” - I want to say, looking at Malevich's Black Square or another picture that looks simple, but brought its author a lot of money.
Well, it's never too late to take some paint, splash it onto the canvas, and try to sell your creation profitably. And to motivate you for this achievement, we present the top 10 most expensive single-color paintings in the world.
Some of these masterpieces of painting were not exhibited at auctions, and their value can only be named approximately.
10. Shiraze Hushiari, "Veil"
The price is 60 thousand dollars.
In 1999, Iranian artist Shiraze Hushiari painted a canvas that appears to be just an unevenly colored black square. According to Shiraze herself, this is a self-portrait.
The artist wrote Sufi phrases in Arabic on black painted canvas. However, they can only be seen at very close range. Critics consider her work to be something between painting and graphics.
9. Li Yuan Chia, "Monochrome White Painting"
The possible cost of the work is $ 100,000.
It is a white canvas with four small cardboard circles placed on the canvas, just below and to the left of the center. The two large circles are on the left, while the two smaller ones are closer to the center.
The circles are covered with the same white paint as the rest of the painting. Chia described these circles as "cosmic points," a motif he developed in the early 1960s and remained central to his later practice.
The asymmetric placement of "cosmic points" in the picture gives it an element of randomness, which is refuted by the severity and simplicity of the canvas as a whole.
8. Allan McCollum, Surrogate Paintings
Sold for 125 thousand euros
Although the work of a contemporary American artist looks like framed paintings, in fact they are painted dummies. At the same time, there are no two identical "Surrogate paintings". Although they are mass-produced, each dummy is hand-painted.
According to the author's idea, such pseudo-paintings should help bridge the gap between art and automation.
7. Gerhard Richter, "Blood Red Mirror"
The cost of the painting is $ 1.1 million.
German artist Gerhard Richter's paintings range from detailed, almost photorealistic portraits to monochromatic paintings. He even designed a stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral, which is formed from squares of multicolored glass in random order.
One of the artist's most famous works, The Blood-Red Mirror, is indeed a mirror painted over with red paint. It was sold in 2009 for $ 1.1 million. I wonder what the buyer wants to see in such a mirror?
6. Ed Reinhardt, Abstract Painting
Approximate price - from $ 2 million.
The artist from New York was in his youth a supporter of abstract expressionism, the subconscious use of colors and shapes.His early works included geometric shapes and other traditional techniques.
However, after the 1940s, Reinhardt began to create paintings consisting entirely of one color. In the last 10 years of his life, he created only a series of square canvases, completely painted in black.
At first glance, they may seem completely faceless. But there are subtle differences between each painting that can take hours, if not days, to discover.
When these creations by Reinhardt were first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one visitor canceled his membership in protest.
5. Yves Klein, "The Nameless Blue Monochrome"
The likely price is $ 3-4 million.
If you want to see what the "mood color blue" looks like, take a look at the works of the French artist Yves Klein, one of which opens the top 5 most expensive monochrome paintings in the world. The main color in his work symbolizes the infinity of the universe.
In 1958, the artist presented his exhibition in Paris entitled "Emptiness", having previously sent out invitations to a huge number of people on blue paper and, of course, in blue envelopes. And its name did not deceive the audience: inside the room, empty walls of blue and white were waiting for them.
Klein even created a trademark, patenting his own version of the ultramarine pigment recipe called International Klein Blue. Until the artist's death, the "International Klein Blue" was his trademark.
4. Piero Manzoni, "Achrom"
One of the works in the series went under the hammer at Christie’s auction for $ 5.2 million.
We already wrote about this scandalous artist in a selection of the simplest things that made their owners fabulously rich... He did not hesitate to sell his feces to connoisseurs of art (and they took it), signed the bodies of volunteers and gave them a certificate of authenticity, handed out boiled eggs with his own fingerprint to the visitors of the exhibition and did many other things that were eccentric at best.
One of Manzoni's projects was Achrom, a series of monochrome paintings that were made by placing canvas in liquid kaolin. The complete absence of color was supposed to focus the viewer's attention on the material qualities of the object. Wrinkles and folds appeared during the production and drying of the canvas, and the artist's hand did not touch them.
Towards the end of the series, Manzoni stopped using canvas and started using cotton, acrylic resin, fiberglass, and other materials. He also began to tint his work with pigments that change color over time.
3. Bryce Marden, painting by Dylan
May cost about $ 10 million.
This painting was named after Bob Dylan, a friend of Marden's. The artist created it to help the singer's career. However, by the time the work was completed, Dylan, the future Nobel laureate in literature, was already better known than Marden.
The canvas was covered with a mixture of turpentine and beeswax, to which a gray color was added. The artist then used a spatula to level the surface. A strip of unpainted canvas remained at the bottom of the painting.
2. Kazimir Malevich, "Black Square"
Sotheby's auction estimates the painting at $ 20 million.
Perhaps the most famous one-color painting in the world, which the jokers aptly called "Blacks in the black room steal coal." It is one of the Suprematist works of the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich, in which he studied the basic possibilities of color and composition.
While Reinhardt filled his entire canvas with black paint, Malevich simply painted a black square in the center of his canvas. This work became part of a triptych, which also included "Black Circle" and "Black Cross".
Although the painting was once flawless black, age has left its mark on it in the form of numerous cracks on the surface.
1. Robert Rauschenberg, "White Series of Paintings"
Rauschenberg's paintings cost up to $ 89 million.
Five paintings in this series are a set of 1, 2, 3, 4 or 7 identical white canvases hung together.When they were first presented to the public, they looked like a cheap gimmick, and now Rauschenberg's white paintings can be found in galleries around the world.
Rauschenberg was a friend of composer John Cage, who wrote a piece of music called 4'33. During the performance, the pianist or other instrumentalist must sit silently for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. As a result, the audience only hears the sounds of the environment. Maybe this is the perfect accompaniment to these pictures.