Secret Painting


Secret Painting is a series of artworks created by British conceptual artist Mel Ramsden for the collective Art & Language between 1967 and 1968. The series consists of monochrome paintings juxtaposed with text panels explaining the absence of a conventional subject; for example, one states that the painting in question is invisible.

Background and analysis

The series is distinguished from the monochrome paintings usually produced in the field of visual arts by their accompanying block of texts. It references both the history of monochrome painting and Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, as well as functioning as an answer given by Ramsden to the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, an American painter and theoretician, a precursor of conceptual and minimal art.
The series has raised questions of the status of the art object and the play that is established between the artist and the visitor in the possible revelation of content. To his amusement, during the exhibition 1969: The Black Box of Conceptual Art, Ann Stephen said:

Exhibitions