In 2022, Cornelia Parker had the British Army blow up a shed full of toys and gardening tools for a piece in her solo at the Tate Britain. The English artist has since shifted gears. Her latest project, a series of oil paintings inspired by the color charts of the pioneering color theorist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, is now at Frith Street Gallery. To create these paintings, Parker used a website that applies Vanderpoel’s method of breaking down images into analytical color grids. Feeding it vintage headlines, magazine covers, and photographs spanning more than a century of global events—the Titanic’s sinking; the “I have a dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr.—Parker explores Vanderpoel’s belief that any object might reveal unexpected harmonies of color. “[The] source material highlights the absurdity, humour and tragedy of the human condition at a time when print ‘heritage’ media is in decline,” states the gallery’s press release. Parker’s works on glass, created using homemade pigments made from recycled materials, are also on view. —Jeanne Malle