Why mounting colour matters when displaying work.
This extract from an article on the BBC website makes it clear.
What happens if I change the context surrounding the squares, but not the two squares themselves?
And yet all we’ve done is put them on different backgrounds. As a result, the small square on the dark background looks lighter than the one on the light background.
This is called the “brightness contrast illusion”, which proves that context is everything when it comes to what we see, even when seeing the simplest qualities of the world, namely lightness.
So try it the next time you are mounting a piece of work and make sure you choose the right shade to really compliment the work.