MADSON’S TOP TEN PINKS
Ryan Madson is a writer, artist, and design educator. His writings about art, environments, and their intersections with futurity have been published in CLOT Magazine, Offscreen, Sound of Life, Strelka Mag, and others. He recently collaborated with artist Matt Toole on an installation, Pop-Cycled Apocalypse, for the Drive Thru Art Box in Savannah, on view through January 10th, 2025.
Links below to explore the artists mentioned in this feature.
Philip Guston Amy Sillman Tal R Ludwig Leo Franz West Cy Twombly Katherine Bernhardt
James Benjamin Franklin Loveless by My Bloody Valentine Kelly Boehmer
“Pink is a really difficult color,” artist Jiha Moon explained to me recently. She clarified that pink is not necessarily difficult for an artist to work with. Rather, it can be antagonistic within the polite spaces of bourgeois interiors and decor. The difficulty lies in pink’s fitful coexistence with everything else. Walls, furniture, and other art are unable to accommodate without jarring clashes of color and affect. Moon was referring especially to pink in its more vivid hues, like hot pinks, magentas, and fuchsias, which she also happens to enjoy using in her ceramics and painting practices. (Moon co-curated the fall 2024 show, emotion, at Laney Contemporary.)
A punk sensibility might conclude that art with quantities of pink can make a statement against bourgeois taste and the commercial art market. If my art doesn’t vibe with your sensibilities, so much the better. Yet the many cultural signifiers of pink are complex and contradictory. In one setting acid pink bubblegum can appear anti-establishment, punk, or Fauvist. In another, pink becomes an essential pop ingredient in service of branding and advertising. “Owing to a focus on gender-conforming roles in the family, combined with the rise of mass consumerism, brands and marketing, firms began to denote pink for women and baby girls,” explains paint manufacturer Winsor & Newton in their Color Story series. “As it became common for parents to find out the gender of their children from the 1980s onwards, retailers across the world started to create gender-specific clothes, toys, and gifts. Cue the uprising of dolls and pink garments from Polly Pocket to Barbie – even today, the latter’s parent company owns the copyright to a shade called ‘Barbie Pink.’”
Pink in an artist’s palette can be violent and moody or warm and soothing, depending on context and intention. “Nude” or “flesh” pinks have become obsolete due to their racial centrism. To the human eye, pink is actually a combination of red and purple light that our brains tend to interpret as a single color. For the painter, pink is created simply by mixing red with white, and amended with purples, blues, or yellows to create a spectrum of colors that we still recognize as pink. In 2023, pink became the new “it” color. Viva Magenta, a hot pink, was Pantone’s color of the year. The Barbie movie held the top spot at the global box office, propelled by the imagery of its absurdist pink playscapes. The pink-adjacent Peach Fuzz is Pantone’s color of 2024. Pink still rules.
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