Color Flow: Gerhard Richter & Zhuang Hong Yi

SmithDavidson Gallery presents Color Flow as an online viewing room shaped around the idea that color can operate as a temporal and spatial experience.

Gerard Richter’s abstract paintings are formed through successive layers of pigment shaped by mechanical and gestural interventions. The remnants of motion are not symbolic, they are embedded in the surface, producing color relations that evolve depending on proximity, angle, and duration of looking. His works demonstrate that abstraction is not the absence of structure, but the visible negotiation between intention and process.

Zhuang Hong Yi constructs chromatic fields using silk flowers individually mounted onto canvas. The flowers function as incremental color modules, building gradients that read like shifting landscapes. Their relief creates soft shadow and dimensional variation, making color responsive to the physical conditions of the screen and the imagination of touch. His method is systematic without appearing rigid, using repetition to produce transition rather than pattern alone.

Viewed together, the works show that flow is not tied to one medium or movement, but to color behaving as something layered, dimensional, and in motion, experienced differently each time it is encountered.