Between black and white, the chromatic and the achromatic, a zone of excess and transition, a threshold with no opposite, the singular character of grey has given rise to some remarkable reflections and conceptualisations in art, philosophy and literature. The guiding spirit and title of this book stem from perhaps the most well-known of these reflections, the passage at the end of Hegel's Preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.’

This passage complicates and challenges the assumptions we may have regarding the character and notion of grey, and opens towards many of the compelling philosophical issues it raises, both as a concept and as a sensible and visible phenomenon: the relationships between abstraction and the concrete, belatedness and beginning, particularity and universality, mediation and immediacy, colour and colourlessness, determination and the indeterminate, repetition and difference, thought and experience, enlivening and deadening. Indeed, ‘grey on grey’ invites us to ‘grayen’ (Samuel Beckett's word), that is, to further abstract and nuance the values traditionally assigned to grey.

Contributions to this volume invite us to reflect on grey in its myriad registers as it crosses epistemological, ontological, ethical, aesthetic, historical and political domains. Bringing together perspectives traversing art, art history, visual studies, philosophy, ecology, media studies and literature, chapters explore grey's enigmatic character as both a non-colour and the fons et origo of colour as such; a fungibility and erasure of difference, but also a nuancing that challenges given determinations; a dulling and levelling down, yet latent with an impersonal intensity; a colour of belatedness and aging, but also indicating new forms of life and vitality. While not every chapter engages with or refers to Hegel's passage explicitly, all of them project its implications in new ways and directions.

This volume is not intended as a comprehensive overview of the meanings and interpretations of grey, nor of the many philosophers, theorists and artists who have drawn inspiration from Hegel's passage, but rather as an interrogation of how grey – and particularly the notion of ‘grey on grey’ – refracts crucial issues concerning the relationship between art and philosophy.