AFTER BLUE - BEFORE RED: Group Show - DUVE Berlin

AFTER BLUE BEFORE RED brings DUVE and PASSAGE together through the colour purple, a colour suspended between two very different histories.

Red comes early. It is one of the oldest colours used and named by humans. Red ochre appears in prehistoric paintings tens of thousands of years ago, drawn directly from earth and iron oxides. Its associations are equally elemental: blood, heat, fire, fertility, danger and life. Across European history, red accumulated meanings of both secular and sacred power, from Roman authority and Christian blood and martyrdom to the robes of cardinals, aristocratic luxury and, eventually, revolution. Red announces itself. It comes forward.

Blue has a different history. Although ever-present in sky and water, stable blue pigments were historically rarer and more difficult to produce. Lapis lazuli, mined principally in what is now Afghanistan, travelled enormous distances to become ultramarine, one of the most precious pigments of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Its value helped bind blue to the sacred, particularly through representations of the Virgin Mary. Even language reflects this different trajectory. Homer famously describes the sea as “wine-dark”, revealing a system of colour that did not correspond neatly to our own. As new pigments made blue increasingly accessible, its associations expanded.

Red and blue suggest opposite movements. Red feels primal, physical and immediate; blue tends towards distance, atmosphere and contemplation. Red can signify urgency, violence and desire; blue calm, melancholy, spirituality and infinity.

And between them, purple.

Purple carries its own extraordinary history. Tyrian purple was produced from marine snails through a lengthy and costly process, requiring thousands of snails to produce small quantities of dye. Its rarity made it a marker of imperial authority, wealth and later religious power. In 1856, this exclusivity collapsed when the eighteen-year-old chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally discovered mauveine, the first commercially successful synthetic purple dye, while attempting to synthesise quinine. A colour once reserved for the few could suddenly be produced on an industrial scale.

Purple is also unusual in how we perceive it. Unlike spectral violet, purple has no single wavelength of light. It emerges when our visual system encounters red and blue light together, effectively creating a colour between opposite ends of the visible spectrum. In After Blue Before Red, purple therefore becomes less a symbol than an interval: a space between warmth and cold, power and wisdom, intensity and calm.

Abstraction allows these qualities to become the subject. Freed from the need to represent a body, object or landscape, colour can be experienced through geometry, colour field, repetition, folds, lines and gesture. The works approach abstraction through different languages, but colour remains their common ground. After Blue Before Red is ultimately a celebration of colour itself. It asks what colour can do before an image begins: how it attracts or repels, advances or withdraws, agitates or calms, and how a shift in hue can alter our experience of an entire surface.

The collaboration between PASSAGE and DUVE occupies this same interval. Somewhere after blue and before red, the exhibition sits.