FROM 'COLD DARK MATTER' TO 'HISTORY PAINTING': CORNELIA PARKER AT FRITH STREET GALLERY

The primary themes in Cornelia Parker’s work are destruction and transformation. After working with the British military to explode a garden shed and its contents, she created Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), an installation in which the shattered fragments were suspended mid-air, frozen at the moment of detonation. To her, the imagery and commonality of explosions in society seemed iconic.

Installation photography courtesy of gallery. Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation

Thirty years on, History Painting at Frith Street Gallery on Golden Square revisits these themes The gallery’s main level featured a series of deceptively abstract oil paintings inspired by historic newspaper covers. The gallery’s basement featured works on glass with Parker’s own pigments painted on. For Gunpowder Plots (2025), she used the ingredients of gunpowder: sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal. For 90 million Years and Counting (2025), she used dinosaur fossils. 

The paintings on the main level are inspired by the work of American visual artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, mainly her 1902 work on colour theory titled Color Problems. A precursor to Modernism, this work takes a scientific approach, drawing on and developing the work of Newton, Goethe, and their more modern peers, Chevreul and Rood. It introduced a collection of colour grids that break down the palettes of everyday, antique, and natural objects. 

Installation photography courtesy of gallery. Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation

Parker was drawn to this collection and Vanderpoel’s suggestion of colour harmonies hidden behind seemingly dull objects. Her color grids were sectioned off by themes, e.g. events related to the war in Gaza, major turning points in American culture, and pictures related to space or the moon. All of the paintings, some deeply political in nature, echo the human condition from the source material; on some level, each grid represents a deconstructed version of an effect we’ve had on the world. 

Cornelia Parker, Why Did No One Stop Him (2025), Earthrise (2025)

We’ll take over Gaza (2025) is dominated by the color white: a metaphorical “cleaning” of the page that represents the devastating effects of mass genocide. The Falling Man (2025) represents the famous photograph of the same name. It retains similar bleak hues that symbolize the tragedy and trauma of the September 11 attacks. Earthrise (2025) takes a famous photograph from the Apollo 8 mission and depicts the earth as a single blue square amidst vast darkness. 

Taking images from newspapers and breaking them down into their composite colour forms helps breathe new life into them. In Vanderpoel’s words: “Until our attention is called to it, we are unconscious what apparently unpromising material may yield new and beautiful motives for colour-harmonies.”

Colour Analysis From I Have a Dream generator design and implementation by Mel Dollison and Liza Daly via colorproblems.art

Parker created her paintings using the colour problems website with am algorithm that returns a Vanderpoel-esque color grid once you input an image. This suggests interest in giving a bit of agency over to the algorithm, while still putting palette knife to canvas.  Although generative technology signifies a growing, controversial trend, this reminds us that it can also function as an auxiliary or conceptual tool for creating art. Parker did not type a prompt into the website and hang up the result in her exhibition, rather she interrogated the website for inspiration and created her own work based on the result. 

Cornelia Parker, Colour Analysis. Photography courtesy of artist.

Colour Problems (2025) is made up of individual colour palettes used for each painting and exhibited as its own work. This unconscious mark-making contrasts with the precision of the colour grids and reminds viewers of the physicality behind this collaboration with external forces. 

In reducing historically charged images to grids of colour, Parker invites us to re-evaluate the way we decode images in the media. In a world that is becoming increasingly desensitised, she deconstructs popular images to reveal their colour harmonies and combat the effects of overexposure. 

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Joaquin Baerga is a sophomore studying journalism at Indiana University.