Apocalypstick brings together 12 artists to create a platform for a discussion about the use of colour in both contemporary art and in the wider world.

Colour has long been associated with the wild, primal and the feminine, as well as being considered intuitive, instinctive and against logic. Encompassing a spectrum from the childlike and playful through to the disturbing and sinister, the work in the show operates on a sliding scale of chaos and sensory disquiet. Pigment and hue is not only a formal element but a psychological one, with colour employed as a metaphor for seduction and intoxication. A radical colour key often refers to a skewed reality, symbolising a loss of control, a sensory overload.

Influenced by our everyday experiences of lurid popular culture, these artists appropriate languages from the ever-morphing multi-media world to produce work that is often overloaded with information. Here, vibrant hues attract and simultaneously repel. The Twentieth Century saw vivid colour move from associations with bejeweled opulence, religion and power to the tasteless tackiness of advertising, television and high street fashion. Resplendent in the neon and plastics of contemporary consumer culture, synthetic colours changed the face of the landscape whilst technicolour cinema and fractal, glowing computer graphics altered perceptions and imaginations. Trash was colourful, and colour became trash.

Some of the artists’ work reflects the psychological noise emanating from pop culture’s velocity, as in James Howard’s garish collages of appropriated internet imagery, John Walter’s screaming neon and glitter quotations and day-glo collages, and Ludovica Gioscia’s wallpaper and accessory encrusted tributes to the Paninaro phenomenon of 1980’s Milan.

Colour is used to conceal objects and meaning, just as makeup such as lipstick is used to conceal the true flesh underneath. Shane Bradford’s Auto-Fascist painting and sculpture are the antithesis of the chaotic rainbow meltdowns seen elsewhere in the show. Rebelling against his previous work where objects were dipped in seductive candy-coloured layers of gloss paint, here he has imposed a strict set of colour rules. His Fasci (a Roman weapon consisting of sticks bound together) is dipped in white, green, black and silver – colour itself is used as a weapon. Sinta Tantra also utilises colour rules in her geometrically patterned ceiling mural that warps the space and disorientates the viewer, whilst Siân Hislop’s tributes to teenage pinups explore the notion of nostalgia through psychedelic tie-die and 1980’s neon takes on Victorian colour-tinted photographs.

When bright colours are introduced, the work automatically changes in meaning – colour skews reality and images and objects become more appealing, more sensuous or more repulsive. Apocalypstick unites artists who are unashamed chromophiles, in a gleefully grotesque mardi-gras of pigment, plastic and optical chaos.

Apocalypstick is curated by Siân Hislop and Jeremy Willett, and features work by: Jonathan Baldock, Shane Bradford, James Ferris, Richard Gasper, Ludovica Gioscia, Siân Hislop, James Howard, Dunstan James, Sinta Tantra, Bea Turner, John Walter and Jeremy Willett

Special event: Friday 25th February, 6.30pm – 9pm The artist and writer David Batchelor, author of Chromophobia, will give a talk. This will be followed by Artists’ Desert Island YouTube, where the exhibiting artists present a selection of videos that have influenced their work in an informal discussion.