DAVID BATCHELOR
‘CHROMOPHILIA’
Following our previous collaboration on Chromoscreen 01 and 02 for Tate, Atelier JI are pleased to welcome David Batchelor (b. 1955, Dundee, Scotland) back to the studio. Chromophilia, developed over five months in 2025, is a suite of twelve screenprints that extends the artist’s ongoing investigation of stacked colour and form, translating his sculptural and collage-based practice into richly layered works on paper.
David Batchelor has had a constant dialogue with colour in print, sculpture, words, drawings and photography since his very first solo exhibitions in the 1990s. In one of his most popular written texts, Chromophobia, he investigates how colour in Western culture has often been cast as the villain, feared or perceived as a dangerous element.
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 1
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 2
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 3
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm“This suite of twelve screen prints is based on a series of collages I have been making for the past two years. The collages are derived from an on-going group of spray-painted concrete sculptures, which are in turn adapted from another group of sculptures, which themselves came from… That is the way work gets made in my studio: everything is partially connected to what came before it and will have some relationship with what comes after it. As a result, there is no clear starting point or end point.”
-David Batchelor
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 4
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 5
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm“At the same time, the prints are their own thing. Each is a stack of between two and seven brightly coloured elements. Each is an imaginary sculpture of more or less pure colour. I wanted every stack to be a one-off balance of semi-regular shapes, and to have its own unique play of colours. I wanted the colours to be as vivid as possible, but also to be dense and as physical as possible.”
-David Batchelor
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 6
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 7
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
“Screen printing can produce the strongest, sharpest colours, and it can also allow those colours to sit on the paper rather than be absorbed into it. Atelier JI developed a unique process designed to fully bring out those qualities I was looking for in the prints. The results are even better than I expected them to be.”
-David Batchelor
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 8
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 9
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
David Batchelor’s Chromophilia series is available to buy as a set or individually.
Chromophilia is available as a box set of twelve prints, a box set with one original collage and as individual prints.
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 10
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 11
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mm
David Batchelor
Chromophilia 12
2025
Screen print with structured catalysed ink and vinyl on Madrid Litho paper (350 gsm).
Paper & image: 595mm x 810mmIn the Studio
In Chromophilia Batchelor celebrates colour, holding his sculptural works in mind whilst playfully reimagining them as two dimensional colour fields, the geometry countered with torn elements and then committed to print where specialist ink allow his totems of colour to lift from the substrate, edges become present, the sculpture existing once again.
“Colour is uncontainable. It effortlessly reveals the limits of language and evades our best attempts to impose a rational order on it. To work with colour is to become acutely aware of the insufficiency of language and theory – which is both disturbing and pleasurable.”
- David Batchelor
Enquiries
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