Jac Leirner Color studies, 2016

These small, Polaroid-scale works are full of color, motion, and turbulence. Installed vertically, they enter into a subtle dialogue, functioning as a formal study of sensation in its brief, heightened intensity.

During her studies, Leirner explored color through a series of watercolors informed by Bauhaus instructor Johannes Itten’s seminal color theory. Drawing on the teachings of Itten as well as the studies of color of the early twentieth-century painters Josef Albers and Paul Klee, she builds each composition through carefully layered washes of luminous pigment—a process that requires patience, precision, and a finely trained sense of color. Leirner often remarks, “I have the head of a painter,” a sensibility we continue to find in her later watercolors.