Zweifarbenbild "blau"

Josef Bauer

Zweifarbenbild "blau", 2015

Artwork text

At first glance, the word “blue” in red lettering on a wooden panel painted yellow is a contradiction in terms. Since the mid-1980s, Josef Bauer has been exploring semantic questions of linguistic understanding to describe our reality in his group of works entitled “Two-Colored Paintings”. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who had a significant influence on modern linguistics (structuralist linguistics), held the view that every linguistic sign is “two-sided” because it has two aspects, an expressive aspect and a content aspect. According to his theory, the relationship between the signifier (the external form of the linguistic sign, e.g. letters) and the signified (the content of the linguistic sign, its meaning) is arbitrarily determined and is based on agreement. (Doris Leutgeb)