Achromatic primary

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In 1994 Milan Mrkusich was commissioned to design windows for the new Museum of New Zealand building. A spectacular array of coloured panels, two storeys high and running the length of the building, the windows were the result of a fifty-year engagement not just with colour, but with architecture as well. As a young abstract painter, Mrkusich held his first solo exhibition at the Auckland University College School of Architecture in 1949. In the 1950s he worked for the architecture and design company Brenner Associates. One of his partners there, Stephen Jelicich, went on to found the firm that eventually became Jasmax, the architects responsible for Te Papa. Mrkusich designed his own modernist house during this period and worked on a number of other architectural commissions, including a series of magnificent stained-glass windows for St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Grey Lynn, Auckland, in 1958.

The paintings that followed the Te Papa commission seemed to reflect a new intensity in Mrkusich’s use of colour. In the ‘Achromatic’ series, simple propositions about colour — the system of achromatic, primary and secondary colours that had grounded Mrkusich’s earlier paintings — are constructed and elaborated anew. Architectural associations are evident in the multiple canvases that make up the individual paintings.

Achromatic primary features the red, yellow and blue indicated in its title, along with four achromatic colours — black, white and two shades of grey. Mrkusich departs from that schema, however, by introducing the secondary colours of orange and crimson. The four canvases of Achromatic primary are predominantly achromatic, but this serves to intensify the visual experience of the chromatic colours. In the second panel, for instance, a blue square is poised against a black one and thus bolstered from the dullness of the surrounding grey. Similarly, the third panel is a striking spectrum of white, yellow, orange and red, contrasting with the darkness of the final panel. Such vividness and intensity shows that colour remained for Mrkusich a life force.

William McAloon