Work by David Batchelor (b. 1955) is largely concerned with the experience of colour in modern urban life. It typically comprises found light-industrial objects or domestic utensils – from warehouse dollies, lightboxes or balls of electrical flex to cheap plastic bottles, toys or sunglasses. These objects are either themselves brightly coloured, or they provide a support for panels of vivid, often illuminated colours. This summer the GEM presents a retrospective of Batchelor’s sculptures, drawings and paintings.

The first work is from 1993 – a key year in his artistic development. It was in that year, while making a small three-dimensional work, Talisman, that Batchelor first used colour and began to realise its potential to form a distinctive part of a work of art. A simple improvised work consisting of a vertical rectangle of pink Plexiglas and a supporting structure of found wooden elements, Batchelor’s original aim was to produce a sculpture that would not permit a viewer seeing one side of it to know what the other side looked like. In the course of the work, however, he discovered the power of colour. From that point on, he started to produce his characteristic three-dimensional works in which colour is the dominant factor, but which invariably also feature a deliberate contrast between that colour and darker, rougher materials.

These concerns are continued and developed in a number of Batchelor’s later three-dimensional work, such as The Spectrum of Hackney Road (2003), and Magic Hour (2004/07), the work that gives the exhibition its title. At over three metres high, this work consists of an irregular cluster of found industrial lightboxes that stand facing the gallery wall, as if with its back turned to the viewer. However, vivid yellow, blue, red, green and violet lights emanate from the boxes, form a luminous halo around the steel structure, and provide a dynamic contrast with its dark, absorbent surfaces.

Since the mid-1990s, in addition to his three-dimensional works, Batchelor has made an extensive cycle of colour-based drawings, photographs and, more recently, paintings. These works address the complex relations between colour, line and form, often in the shape of proposals for hypothetical (and often impossible) sculptures of pure disembodied colour.

Since graduating in 1980, David Batchelor has exhibited widely in Europe, the Americas and, more recently Asia. Most importantly, his work was included in Tate Britain’s Days Like These: Tate Triennial of Contemporary Art (2003), The 26^th Bienal of Sao Paulo (2004) and in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Liverpool (2008-09). Batchelor is a writer as well as an artist; his books include Chromophobia (2000), about colour and the fear of colour in the West; and Colour (2008), an anthology of writings on colour he edited and introduced. During the exhibition at the GEM, a short video in which the artist talks about Magic Hour and its connection with Piet Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie will be shown on the GEM website and on ArtTube.