Ordovas presents Golds, an exhibition exploring one of the most symbolic colours in the history of art, and how it has been used and represented in the work of significant artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The exhibition features 11 works of art and represents a diverse and international group of artists including Carl Andre, Lucio Fontana, Donald Judd, Giuseppe Pinone, Edmund de Waal and Andy Warhol. These modern works are shown alongside a masterpiece of medieval art: an exceptional champlevé enamel chasse from Limoges, France, created circa 1200 and believed to have housed and protected one of the most precious relics: a piece of the True Cross.

Golds is the latest in a series of exhibitions held over recent years exploring the use of a single colour; previous editions were dedicated to white in 2017 and blue in 2020. The catalogue includes an essay written by Jennifer Scott, Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, and curator of the Royal Collection’s landmark exhibition Gold which was shown at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 2014-2015.

Since ancient times, gold has been treasured and used as a symbol of prestige, prosperity and sacred power, reserved for the most exclusive commissions and works of art. Its allure spans millenia and civilisations, from the Bronze Age to today. Representing this historical significance in the exhibition is an outstanding survival of medieval art: a magnificent gilded and enamelled reliquary chasse showing the Crucifixion which was created circa 1200 by one of the foremost workshops of the southern French city of Limoges, the leading centre for enamel production in all of Europe. It was produced to house and protect the most precious relics belonging to a church, most likely in this case a piece of the True Cross.

More recently, shades of gold have been used notably in paintings and sculpture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as colours and materials that mimic it. The earliest modern work in the exhibition is Walking, Onward, an extremely rare, gold leaf bronze by Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964). It was cast in 1926, shortly after the Ukrainian-born American artist’s move from Europe to the United States which was enjoying an economic golden age during the ‘Roaring Twenties’. It is shown in Europe for the first time since it featured at the artist’s retrospective at the Musée Rodin, Paris, in 1969–70.

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was fascinated with gold since childhood when he had regularly attended John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh which is extensively decorated with large- scale wall icons. In the 1950s, he often used gilding materials including gold leaf in both his commercial and artistic work, such as a series of gold shoe collages which he exhibited in the 1956, and in which he personified various notables and celebrities of the day. Two examples shown here were executed in the same year in gold copper leaf and are inscribed Margaret Truman and Beatrice Lielie; they were both formerly in the collection of David Evins, known as the ‘dean of American shoe designers’.

Concetto Spaziale by Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) was executed in 1960-61, the year that Yuri Gagarin became the first person to journey into outer space, and a time when the artist’s continued explorations into the relationship between surface and dimensionality saw him puncture the canvas, creating what he referred to as a ‘fourth dimension’. In this canvas, the artist has applied thick layers of gold-coloured paint, recalling the art of the past while employing it for his pioneering art of the modern age; he later said of gold that it was ‘...as beautiful as the sun’.

A long-term friend of Fontana, and another giant of post-war Italian art, Fausto Melotti (1901-1986) is represented in the exhibition with Le bacche, a sculpture executed circa 1976. His sculptures often incorporated gold and brass, and were influenced by architecture, the ancient world, poetry and mathematics. Also mimicking gold, and also executed in 1976, is Sixth Copper Corner, a modular floor sculpture of 21 interchangeable plates by the American minimalist artist Carl Andre (1935–2024). The artist was a pioneer of conceptual art who made a conscious choice never to use real gold, instead turning to the six common industrial metals - aluminium, copper, iron, magnesium, lead and zinc – which were more reasonably priced. In contrast, a wall sculpture made in 1988 by another great American artist associated with minimalism, Donald Judd (1928-1994), is made of anodized aluminium closely resembling gold.

Two works of art which use real gold, rather than materials that resemble it, are Spoglia d’oro, 2001, by Giuseppe Penone (b.1947) and Gold Bullets, 2003, by Chris Burden (1946-2015). Penone is known for works which explore the relationship between man, art, and nature; this loosely folded gold sheet is imprinted with marks resembling the veins of tree leaves. From the 1970s onwards, Burden incorporated both gold bars and guns in his work; his golden bullets in this exhibition echo Shoot (1971), the artist’s most notorious piece of performance artwork, when a friend shot him in the shoulder with a rifle.

The most recent work in the exhibition is K. 314 by Edmund de Waal (b.1964). Executed in 2022, this sculpture incorporates porcelain, lead, gold, aluminum, and plexiglass. As with his literary works, the artist’s installations of handmade porcelain vessels, often contained in minimalist structures, investigate themes of diaspora, memory, and materiality.