The exhibition title Black Light. Positions of the Sublime in Contemporary Art is irritating; the title refers primarily not to black light, but to the sublime as a concept of art, which began to establish itself at the latest in the mid-20th century in U.S. postwar painting - for example, in the work of Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko. The sublime serves as an aesthetic category for beauty and horror and illustrates how certain phenomena transcend the imagination. In Solothurn, Switzerland, from October 9, 2021, works by contemporary artists that illustrate the sublime both seriously and ironically will be on view under this predicate. But what makes the intangible representable above all are light and empty spaces. This is how the paradoxical pair of terms in the title finally came together: The oxymoron Black Light accentuates the unimaginable in the sublime.
Until January 2, 2022, Solothurn will present works by artists of several generations who have visualized the category of the sublime in their works. Among them are Julian Charrière (*1987), Sara Masüger (*1978), Hiroshi Sugimoto (*1948), Albrecht Schnider (*1958) or Robert Zandvliet (*1979).
