"Additive/Subtractive," (1978-1980) a conceptual installation exhibited in 1980, at Le Centre d'Art Contemporaine in Geneva, Switzerland. It was part of a three-person show (along with Lawrence Weiner and Pat Steir), each of us having a separate floor in the museum.
Currated by Adelena Von Furstenberg, it put into context many of the premises I had been working on up until then in both painting and photography.
The series of twenty-one cat Cibachromes, (seven triptychs) were shown along with glaze paintings, which were done directly on the walls, windows, and floors.
The title “Additive/Subtractive” comes from the notion that light waves can be added to each other to form new colors while pigment colors subtract light, or absorb waves that are not reflected.
Glazes in painting form a bridge between these two concepts of color because although they are made with pigment, they are transparent and act much like a filter color in photography.
This was also the subject of my first one-person museum show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1982.
