The exhibition explores the intrinsic relationship between art and alchemy. Both seek to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, attributing ideological and spiritual meaning to the materials themselves. As in the alchemical visions of Yves Klein, who considered art as a means toward liberating matter and color as the materialization of sensibility, the material becomes the idea. In his text “The Monochrome Adventure” Klein wrote:

Sensibility has no hidden corners; it is like humidity in the air. Color, for me, is the “materialization” of sensibility.

Gershom Scholem, the leading scholar of Jewish mysticism, has written, in Alchemy and Kabbalah, that “at the center of any alchemy, however understood, is the transmutation of metals into gold as the highest and most noble one existing in the world.” The medieval name used for alchemists was artistae (those who know the art of alchemy) and fire was considered the elementary force of creation, which was applied to the prima materia, the first matter. The purely “chemical” pursuit of physical gold, however, soon became replaced by philosophical gold — the purification and perfection of the soul. Among the works on view, ranging from the 1960s to the present, will be John Chamberlain’s #33 (1966), a rarely exhibited sculpture he made by cutting, folding, and tying polyurethane foam into instant material presence; Man Ray’s gilded book object Lèvres d’or (1967); Yves Klein’s Table bleue (1961/2006), filled with blue pigment; one of Andy Warhol’s original helium-filled Silver Clouds (c. 1966); Walter De Maria’s stainless-steel High Energy Bar (c. 1966); several works by Roberts Watts, including Radioactive Substance (1977), a lead box with gold lettering, and two Chromed Stones (1963); James Lee Byars’s gilded Philosophical Nail (1986); Teresita Fernández’s Burnout (2005), an amorphous configuration of small glass cubes; a drawing from Spencer Finch’s Studies on Alchemy (1997), made in homage to Strindberg's alchemical experiments and a reference to Wittgenstein's famous line about Rembrandt painting gold but never using gold paint; and a 2006 painting by Dean Byington, entitled Tourmaline, an imaginary landscape of prismatic crystals.

Klaus Ottmann is an independent curator and scholar based in New York. His most recent curatorial project, Still Points of the Turning World, the Sixth SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, remains on view through January 7, 2007. Ottmann recently translated Gershom Scholem’s book Alchemy and Kabbalah into English and is the author of Thought Through My Eyes: Writings On Art, 1977–2005; The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition; James Lee Byars: Life, Love, and Death, as well as many other books, articles and essays on art and philosophy. He is currently writing a book on the philosophy of Yves Klein.