Interaction of Color by Josef Albers was a relatively late discovery for me. My artistic education was shaped primarily by The Art of Color by Johannes Itten. In this work, Itten combines theoretical reflections with visual demonstrations that explore colour interaction through his theory of the Seven Colour Contrasts. Yet the approaches of these two artists and colour theorists differ in important ways. Itten’s colour theory is a structured system explaining how colours are organized, how they contrast and harmonize, and how they can produce expressive and psychological effects in art. His ideas reflect the early twentieth-century belief that visual language could reveal deeper psychological or universal truths.

Neither Itten nor Albers sought to express personal emotion in the gestural sense associated with the artists of Abstract Expressionism. Their emphasis, however, differs. Itten combined perceptual study with expressive interpretation, whereas Albers concentrated almost entirely on perception itself. He was fascinated by the relativity and instability of colour, arguing that colour is fundamentally deceptive: it is almost never perceived as it physically is, but always in relation to its surroundings. In this sense, Albers’ work can be interpreted as a critique of Bauhaus colour theories associated with Itten and Wassily Kandinsky. Rather than proposing universal symbolic meanings, Albers emphasized experimental observation. For him, meaning emerges solely from context, from perceptual relationships.

While Albers successfully dismantled what he saw as the rigid or mystical aspects of earlier colour systems, his focus on contextual relativity may obscure another dimension of colour perception. Contemporary neuroscience suggests that human perception is not entirely neutral. Evolutionary biology appears to have shaped certain physical and emotional responses to particular wavelengths. From this perspective, some of Itten’s ideas, often dismissed as dogmatic or mystical, may instead reflect intuitive observations of underlying biological tendencies. A more complete understanding of colour may therefore lie in bridging these perspectives: acknowledging Albers’ insight that context profoundly alters perception, while also recognizing that biology provides a foundational emotional framework. Otherwise, the postmodern rejection of universals risks discarding genuine biological patterns along with outdated theoretical assumptions.

Albers’ major contribution lies above all in his pedagogy. He repeatedly emphasized that colour cannot truly be understood through description alone; it must be tested through observation and experiment. In this sense, his teaching remains remarkably relevant today. The workshop Interaction of Colour in Space, organized by ICA Belgium and the Deutsches Farbenzentrum and inspired by Interaction of Color, offers an opportunity to revisit these questions through practice. By working with colour in spatial and perceptual exercises, participants can experience firsthand the shifting relationships that fascinated Albers, while also considering how recent insights from neuroscience and biological psychology suggest that our perception of colour is shaped not only by context but also by deeper physiological and evolutionary responses.

“In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.” – Interaction of Color, Josef Albers

With this observation, Albers points to something fundamental: colour is never isolated. It emerges through relationships and is shaped by contrast, surroundings, light, material, proportion, and spatial context. To work with colour therefore means developing sensitivity not to colour as a fixed entity, but to colour as a living and active perception.

A central aspect of Albers’ teaching is that practice precedes theory. Colour cannot be fully understood through concepts alone; it must be experienced, tested, and compared through observation. Insight grows from experience, and evaluation from comparison. In this sense, colour is not simply knowledge to be acquired, but a perceptual discipline that must be trained. Eye and brain must learn to observe carefully to assess the complexity of colour experience.

This emphasis on observation and experience remains essential for designers. Colours shift when light, neighbouring hues, surfaces, or scale change. Colour decisions therefore require time and an iterative process of observing, experimenting, and re-evaluating. Analytical skill in colour does not arise from rules, but from repeated practice. Colour should involve flexible imagination, invention, and the ability to think in situations rather than formulas. This is where his work still feels radical as he resists the idea that colour can be reduced to recipes, harmonies, or universal systems. Instead, he invites us to search for unexpected relationships, fostering innovation, analytical comparison and fantasy.

At the same time, I would like to add colour practice should not be guided by personal taste alone. It must remain attentive to those who inhabit the spaces, objects, and atmospheres we create. Colour perception is not only an optical event; it is also social, emotional, spatial, and cultural. It extends into lived space and becomes part of how we orient ourselves, of how we feel, and of how we relate to the world. Albers asked us to replace retrospection with introspection. That remains a powerful invitation. But today, perhaps this is not enough. Alongside introspection, we also need projection: a way of looking forward. We need to ask not only how colour works, but what colour can do - how it can shape more attentive, inclusive, and meaningful futures.

The workshop « Interaction of Colour in Space », co-organised by the German Colour Association (Deutsches Farbenzentrum e.V.) and ICA Belgium, takes this approach as a starting point. Rather than applying historical lessons unchanged, it invites participants to test Albers’ ideas in spatial situations - through observation, comparison, and experimentation.

We invite you to read another article from the Collection of Essays dedicated to Josef Albers, this time by Julia Hausmann.

Warm greetings from Belgium,

-your ICA-Belgium team

Collection of Essays on Albers

This essay is part of a Collection of Essays dedicated to Josef Albers, where the organisers of the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space share their thoughts about Josef Albers and his impact on their work.

Hommage to Josef Albers

By Julia Hausmann

“We never really perceive what color really is, as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.” – Josef Albers

Hardly any other artist has combined colour, art, space and craftsmanship as consistently as Josef Albers. His works remain highly relevant to this day – not only in art itself, but also in teaching. The holistic design principles of the Bauhaus had a lasting influence on both him and his wife, Anni Albers. At the same time, both further developed these principles and exerted a decisive influence on them through their own work and teaching. I find the poetry that is evident in both their works particularly moving.

The pictures from the series Homage to the Square show colour in its effect and at the same time as a material – the surface structure and the colour surfaces have enormous depth. The works allow us to experience how colours interact with each other, change, have a spatial effect and create emotional resonance. Unfortunately, the fascination and subtlety of these works is often flattened and simplified by the multitude of reproductions. That is precisely why it is so special to experience Albers’ works in their original form.

We, at the German Colour Association, are therefore all the more delighted to be able to hold a two-day international workshop entitled Interaction of Colour in Space at the Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop in collaboration with ICA Belgium. This will provide an opportunity to experience the added value of the originals first-hand and to explore Albers’ thoughts on the effect of colour in his birthplace.

What’s more, the museum itself is a special place that I always enjoy visiting: the ensemble of the museum, built in the 1970s, whose square floor plans refer to Homage to the Square, and the extension completed in 2022 by Swiss architects Gigon Guyer, together with the surrounding park, form a remarkable architectural and landscape feature. A small oasis in the Ruhr area, it provides a particularly inspiring setting for the practical workshop on colour.

- Julia Hausmann is an architect, speaker, lecturer at the University of Wuppertal and founder of FARBARCHITEKTUR. She serves as the Vice-President of the German Colour Association (Deutsches Farbenzentrum e.V.).

We invite you to a special 2-day workshop, organised in collaboration with Deutsches Farbenzentrum and with the support of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop and the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation.

Led by two internationally acclaimed experts, the workshop brings together outstanding voices in architectural colour research and practice: Maria Zurbuchen-Henz and Juan Serra Lluch.

Through hands-on exercises, critical discussion, and applied research, both lecturers offer their distinct interpretations - translating colour theory into spatial experience, material expression, and design strategy.

This is a rare opportunity to engage deeply with colour, exchange ideas with leading experts, and gain new perspectives at a unique setting of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, where art, theory, and architecture meet. Expand your practice in the very halls where Albers’ legacy lives.

Full details and programme:

Registration

Members’ News

Nanna van Heest

Welcoming our new team member

Elisabetta Borriello will be helping us with social media in the coming months. Elisabetta, we are very happy to have you on our team, welcome!

Hello,

I’m Elisabetta, a multidisciplinary designer currently based in Austria, working across graphic, textile and surface practices, and lecturing in design.

My practice moves between digital and analogue, driven by curiosity for materials, tools, and the search for the right balance in each project’s outcome. I’m particularly fascinated by the language of colour and how its meaning and perception shift across contexts.

I’m very happy to be supporting ICA Belgium with communication and visual content, and would love to connect with the wider community.

Here you can follow some of my work and ongoing explorations:

Website / Instagram

Open Call: The Albers Accessibility Awards

Deadline: 1 May 2026

For more information on how to apply check here.

Colour Exhibitions on our radar

Joan Semmel: Continuities

22 April - 27 June 2026: Xavier Hufkens, Rivoli, Brussels

April 17 - May 30, 2026: Alexander Gray, New York

Continuities is an exhibition of recent paintings by Joan Semmel (b. 1932), presented by Xavier Hufkens (Brussels) and Alexander Gray Associates (New York). Conceived with the artist as a single presentation across Brussels and New York, the exhibition’s structure mirrors the paintings’ own logic, playing with doubling and immediacy to extend the act of seeing across continents.

Semmel paints her own body as an authored image - internalised rather than observed. In her nineties, that act carries weight. While the aging female form is routinely edited from view, these canvases place it squarely at the centre, without apology or disguise.

These paintings draw on strategies that have long shaped Semmel’s work - the cropping and emotive colour of her 1970s canvases and the multiple figures of her Overlays (1992–1996) and Shifting Image compositions (2006–2013). In works such as Partners (2024) and Fleshed Out (2025), layering allows more than one version of the figure to remain visible, as if the body echoes across the surface. In others, colour and paint handling create that sense of movement without doubling the form outright.

More information:

https://www.xavierhufkens.com/exhibitions/joan-semmel-2

https://www.alexandergray.com/exhibitions/891-joan-semmel-continuities/

As a nonprofit organisation, run entirely by volunteers and on a very limited budget, we are counting on you to help us continue offering free online Colour Talks, colour related information and accessible colour related events and education. Consider to either become an ICA-Belgium member, or a paid newsletter subscriber. You can also buy ICA a coffee.

Hello,

I’m Elisabetta, a multidisciplinary designer currently based in Austria, working across graphic, textile and surface practices, and lecturing in design.

My practice moves between digital and analogue, driven by curiosity for materials, tools, and the search for the right balance in each project’s outcome. I’m particularly fascinated by the language of colour and how its meaning and perception shift across contexts.

I’m very happy to be supporting ICA Belgium with communication and visual content, and would love to connect with the wider community.

Here you can follow some of my work and ongoing explorations:

Website / Instagram

ICA-Belgium is a community of colour lovers that share a common interest in colour, spanning the fields of art, design, architecture, science, industry, education, linguistics, philosophy, history… Join us and get to know other colour professionals and enthusiasts from all around the world (yes, we have international membership!), share about your work, develop opportunities for collaboration, build connections and contribute to a dynamic colour platform. Become an ICA-Belgium member, or a paid newsletter subscriber.

Subscribe now

Over the past few weeks, I have been working hard on a new website. A website that showcases the work I have created over the last few years, since my Master’s research. A portfolio full of colour, research, murals, exhibitions, and a series of works that are for sale.

I am an artist and colour researcher working and living in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Colour takes centre stage in my work as a carrier of personal memories and sensory experiences. From an artistic and research-based approach, I develop colour studies in which the subjective experience of colour is explored and made visible.

My work grows out of observation, slowness, and attention - using colour as a way to perceive more intensely and to come closer to the present moment. Through abstract colour fields, I document and preserve combinations in which colours emerge or can be (re)organised.

To understand the phenomenon of colour and to train my eye, I often work in series. Through systematic colour studies, I explore both the optical effects and the experiential qualities of colour.

These series are realised across different media, including drawings, paintings, murals, textile installations, and screen prints. Alongside my autonomous work and commissioned colour consultancy, I develop interactive workshops that invite participants to discover and deepen their own experiences of colour.

My fascination with colour comes from an insatiable curiosity - how colour constantly shifts depending on context, perception, and personal association. I’m intrigued by how two people can see the same colour yet experience it entirely differently. The tension between the shared and the personal. Conceptually, I understand colour as a relational phenomenon rather than a fixed entity. I’m interested in colour as something unstable and subjective-something that resists absolute definition and instead reveals itself through context: next to another colour, within a space, through memory, language, or emotion.

nannavanheest.com

“We never really perceive what color really is, as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.” – Josef Albers

Hardly any other artist has combined colour, art, space and craftsmanship as consistently as Josef Albers. His works remain highly relevant to this day – not only in art itself, but also in teaching. The holistic design principles of the Bauhaus had a lasting influence on both him and his wife, Anni Albers. At the same time, both further developed these principles and exerted a decisive influence on them through their own work and teaching. I find the poetry that is evident in both their works particularly moving.

The pictures from the series Homage to the Square show colour in its effect and at the same time as a material – the surface structure and the colour surfaces have enormous depth. The works allow us to experience how colours interact with each other, change, have a spatial effect and create emotional resonance. Unfortunately, the fascination and subtlety of these works is often flattened and simplified by the multitude of reproductions. That is precisely why it is so special to experience Albers’ works in their original form.

We, at the German Colour Association, are therefore all the more delighted to be able to hold a two-day international workshop entitled Interaction of Colour in Space at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop in collaboration with ICA-Belgium. This will provide an opportunity to experience the added value of the originals first-hand and to explore Albers’ thoughts on the effect of colour in his birthplace.

What’s more, the museum itself is a special place that I always enjoy visiting: the ensemble of the museum, built in the 1970s, whose square floor plans refer to Homage to the Square, and the extension completed in 2022 by Swiss architects Gigon Guyer, together with the surrounding park, form a remarkable architectural and landscape feature. A small oasis in the Ruhr area, it provides a particularly inspiring setting for the practical workshop on colour.

- Julia Hausmann is an architect, speaker, lecturer at the University of Wuppertal and founder of FARBARCHITEKTUR. She serves as the Vice-President of the German Colour Association (Deutsches Farbenzentrum e.V.).

This essay is part of a Collection of Essays dedicated to Josef Albers, where the organisers of the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space share their thoughts about Josef Albers and his impact on their work.

For more information about the upcoming workshop, see:

Celebrating the International Colour Day (21st of March), we dedicated a Collection of Essays to Josef Albers. Today we bring you the first of them, written by Timo Rieke.

We present you an Open Call for the Albers Accessibility Awards, and invite you to register for the international workshop Interaction of Colour in Space.

Warm greetings from Belgium,

-your ICA-Belgium team

Collection of Essays on Albers

We are introducing a Collection of Essays dedicated to Josef Albers, where the organisers of the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space share their thoughts about Josef Albers and his impact on their work. The essays will be published in the coming weeks on ICA-Belgium website.

Hommage to Josef Albers

by Timo Rieke

Josef and Annie Albers never cease to amaze me. Their enduring relevance lies in a fundamental insight: that colour cannot be applied as a formula, but always enters into relationships.

For Josef Albers, colour is not a thing, not a substance, not a measurable stimulus. It is an event – and events require conditions. Colour emerges in relation: to the colours that surround it, to the light that falls upon it, to the material that carries it, to the space in which it appears, and not least to the eye and experience of the beholder. Anyone who opens Interaction of Color finds no system that guarantees results – but an invitation to test these conditions themselves. For Albers, knowledge about colour is always also self-knowledge: I do not see what is there. I see how I see.

This sets him fundamentally apart from theorists like Itten or Küppers, whose systems carry an implicit promise: master the rules and you master colour. Heinz von Foerster would have called that a trivial machine – same input, same output. Albers builds a non-trivial machine. His exercises produce answers that have already shifted by the time you look at them. This is not a weakness – it is the most honest description of how colour actually works. And perhaps the reason his work does not age: whoever offers no formula cannot be superseded.

No wonder that Luis Barragán – to whom both were personally close – hung a reproduction of Homage to the Square on the north wall of his living room. Some affinities need no explanation.

Albers devoted himself to a single theme with a consistency that has few parallels in art history. From that persistence, iconicity emerged – and a foundation that holds. Artists such as Donald Judd, Sheila Hicks, Ruth Asawa and Cy Twombly carried his thinking in entirely different directions, without exhausting it.

At this year’s Albers Workshop of the German Colour Association (Deutsches Farbenzentrum e.V.) and ICA Belgium, we want to experience precisely that: what it means not to possess colour – but to enter into a relationship with it.

- Timo Rieke is a designer, researcher and professor for colour and surface design at the HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim. He serves as the president of the German Colour Association (Deutsches Farbenzentrum e.V.).

Registration for Interaction of Colour in Space is now open

We invite you to a special 2-day workshop, organised in collaboration with Deutsches Farbenzentrum and with the support of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop and the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation.

Led by two internationally acclaimed experts, the workshop brings together outstanding voices in architectural colour research and practice: Maria Zurbuchen-Henz and Juan Serra Lluch.

Through hands-on exercises, critical discussion, and applied research, both lecturers offer their distinct interpretations - translating colour theory into spatial experience, material expression, and design strategy.

This is a rare opportunity to engage deeply with colour, exchange ideas with leading experts, and gain new perspectives at a unique setting of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, where art, theory, and architecture meet. Expand your practice in the very halls where Albers’ legacy lives.

Where: Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop, Germany

When: June 27–28, 2026

Who: Architects, designers, artists and all colour lovers

Full details and program:

Price

• Member registration (Deutsches Farbenzentrum and ICA Belgium):

  290,00 €

• Normal registration:

  350,00 €

• 4 subsidised student places (see the Open Call bellow):

  40,00 €

Places are limited to 25.

Registration

Open Call: The Albers Accessibility Awards

ICA-Belgium and the Deutsches Farbenzentrum, thanks to the generous support of the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, are pleased to announce four subsidised placements for our upcoming intensive workshop, Interaction of Colour in Space, taking place at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, in Bottrop, Germany, June 27–28, 2026.

The Awards

To support the next generation of creative talent and promote the accessibility of high-level colour education, we are offering 4 subsidised spots to full-time students in higher education (including PhD candidates).

Successful applicants will receive a significant reduction in tuition:

• Subsidised Student Fee: €40 * (Standard Participant Fee: €350)

*Please note that this subsidy doesn’t cover travel, accommodation, and meals.

To apply for an Albers Accessibility Award, please submit the following via email to ica@ica-belgium.org:

1. Proof of Enrollment: A clear copy of your valid student card or an official proof of enrollment for the current academic year.

2. Motivation Statement (Max. 250 words, in English): A short text explaining

   • Why you wish to participate in the Interaction of Colour in Space workshop at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat.

   • How would this workshop impact your current studies, research, personal interest, and/or future career goals.

Email Subject Line: Albers Accessibility Award Application - [Your Full Name]

Key Dates

• Application Deadline: May 1st, 2026 (end of day, CEST)

• Notification of Results: Successful applicants will be notified by email no later than May 15th, 2026.

We look forward to reading your applications and welcoming a dynamic group of students to Bottrop this June!

ICA-Belgium members and yearly subscribers - send us your colour related news! We are happy to share about your colour-related work in the newsletter and our website.

ICA-Belgium is a community of colour lovers that share a common interest in colour, spanning the fields of art, design, architecture, science, industry, education, linguistics, philosophy, history…

Join us and get to know other colour professionals and enthusiasts from all around the world (yes, we have international membership!), share about your work, develop opportunities for collaboration, build connections and contribute to a dynamic colour platform.

As a nonprofit organisation, run entirely by volunteers and on a very limited budget, we are counting on you to help us continue offering free online Colour Talks, colour related information and accessible colour related events and education. Consider to either become an ICA-Belgium member, or a paid newsletter subscriber. You can also buy ICA a coffee.

Josef and Annie Albers never cease to amaze me. Their enduring relevance lies in a fundamental insight: that colour cannot be applied as a formula, but always enters into relationships.

For Josef Albers, colour is not a thing, not a substance, not a measurable stimulus. It is an event – and events require conditions. Colour emerges in relation: to the colours that surround it, to the light that falls upon it, to the material that carries it, to the space in which it appears, and not least to the eye and experience of the beholder. Anyone who opens Interaction of Color finds no system that guarantees results – but an invitation to test these conditions themselves. For Albers, knowledge about colour is always also self-knowledge: I do not see what is there. I see how I see.

This sets him fundamentally apart from theorists like Itten or Küppers, whose systems carry an implicit promise: master the rules and you master colour. Heinz von Foerster would have called that a trivial machine – same input, same output. Albers builds a non-trivial machine. His exercises produce answers that have already shifted by the time you look at them. This is not a weakness – it is the most honest description of how colour actually works. And perhaps the reason his work does not age: whoever offers no formula cannot be superseded.

No wonder that Luis Barragán – to whom both were personally close – hung a reproduction of Homage to the Square on the north wall of his living room. Some affinities need no explanation.

Albers devoted himself to a single theme with a consistency that has few parallels in art history. From that persistence, iconicity emerged – and a foundation that holds. Artists such as Donald Judd, Sheila Hicks, Ruth Asawa and Cy Twombly carried his thinking in entirely different directions, without exhausting it.

At this year’s Albers Workshop of the German Colour Association (Deutsches Farbenzentrum e.V.) and ICA Belgium, we want to experience precisely that: what it means not to possess colour – but to enter into a relationship with it.

- Timo Rieke is a designer, researcher and professor for colour and surface design at the HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim. He serves as the president of the German Colour Association (Deutsches Farbenzentrum e.V.).

This essay is part of a Collection of Essays dedicated to Josef Albers, where the organisers of the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space share their thoughts about Josef Albers and his impact on their work.

ICA-Belgium and the Deutsches Farbenzentrum (German Colour Association), with the generous support of the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, are pleased to announce four subsidised placements for our upcoming intensive workshop, Interaction of Colour in Space, taking place at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, in Bottrop, Germany, June 27–28, 2026.

The Awards

To support the next generation of creative talent and promote the accessibility of high-level colour education, we are offering 4 subsidised spots to full-time students in higher education (including PhD candidates).

Successful applicants will receive a significant reduction in tuition:

• Subsidised Student Fee: €40 * (Standard Participant Fee: €350)

*Please note that this subsidy doesn’t cover travel, accommodation, and meals.

How to Apply

To apply for an Albers Accessibility Award, please submit the following via email to ica@ica-belgium.org:

1. Proof of Enrollment: A clear copy of your valid student card or an official proof of enrollment for the current academic year.

2. Motivation Statement (Max. 250 words, in English): A short text explaining:

   • Why you wish to participate in the Interaction of Colour in Space workshop at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat.

   • How this experience would contribute to your current studies, research, personal interest, and/or future career goals.

Email Subject Line: Albers Accessibility Award Application - [Your Full Name]

Workshop Details

For the full program, lecturer biographies, and more information about the workshop, please visit:

Key Dates

• Application Deadline: May 1st, 2026 (end of day, CET)

• Notification of Results: Successful applicants will be notified by email no later than May 15th, 2026.

We look forward to reading your applications and welcoming a dynamic group of students to Bottrop this June!

More about:

Anni and Josef Albers Foundation: albersfoundation.org

Deutsches Farbenzentrum (DFZ): deutsches-farbenzentrum.de

Interdisciplinary Colour Association (ICA-Belgium): ica-belgium.org

Explore the 10th Photo Brussels Festival with Vinciane Lacroix and discover exhibitions rich in colour. In case you missed our Colour Talk with Juan Serra Lluch, the recording is now available.

Warm greetings from Belgium,

-your ICA-Belgium team

Recording of the Colour Talk with Juan Serra Lluch

If you missed our Colour Talk on the 8th of February 2026, the recording is now available.

Juan Serra Lluch, architect, researcher and professor at the School of Architecture of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), spoke about his book, Color for Architects.

If you’d like to read the book, there are English and French versions available.

You can buy the English book here:

Neue Galerie / Standaard Boekhandel / Biblio / Architectura & Natura

French version, published by Le Moniteur: Utiliser la couleur dans un projet d’architecture, can be bought here:

Libris.nl / Athenaeum Scheltema / Filigranes / Le Moniteur

*ICA-Belgium is an affiliate of Routledge, Libris and Atheneum Scheltema. We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through these links, at no cost to you, which helps support our mission.

Colour Circle Book Club

The first Colour Circle Book Club Meeting will take place on 3 May 2026, with hybrid attendance. The exact time and place will be communicated to members and paid subscribers. Join us in reading Color for Architects by Juan Serra Lluch.

Find out more about the Colour Circle Book Club:

Colour Exhibitions on our radar

Light as a heritage. Church glass windows in Flanders after 1945

12 January - 29 March 2026, KADOC-KU Leuven

The exhibition Light as Heritage focuses on the distinctive character of church stained glass after the Second World War. It explores the revival and development of stained-glass art, presents glass artists whose archives are preserved at KADOC and who were active after 1945, and concludes with an in-depth look at three case studies:
the Church of Saint Hubert in Berchem, featuring work by Joris Van de Broek;
the Church of Our Lady in Kortrijk, with the stained-glass ensemble by Michel Martens; and the parish church of Salvator Mundi in the Hamont district of Lo, with stained-glass windows by Bert Vonk.

Curated by Zsuzsanna Böröcz.

More information

La Bataille des couleurs (The Battle of the Colours)

13 February – 17 August 2026, Maison Pompidou, Paris

Before adopting its iconic pop colours, the Centre Pompidou almost ended up gold and blue, brown, or even… entirely yellow! In the 1970s, during its construction, the chromatic palette of the building designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers (with Gianfranco Franchini and engineers Ove Arup & Partners) was the subject of extraordinary controversy. A true Battle of the Colors is now retraced in an eponymous inaugural exhibition at the Maison Pompidou.

Red for the movement of goods and visitors, blue for air conditioning, green for water, yellow for electricity... each flow network was assigned a colour. While these colours are iconic today, they actually emerged from a succession of events and disputes between 1971 and 1977, during which President Georges Pompidou, the architects, museum curators, and several artists repeatedly composed and recomposed the building’s palette.

Testimonies, drawings, photographs, previously unseen documents, and a materials library shed light on the turbulent origins of this palette. Colour appears here as a central issue - the object of passionate debate and conflict. The exhibition is organised into two sections: a first room dedicated to discovering the chromatic history of the building, and a second room presenting a collection of everyday objects (tables, lighting, buckets, cables, etc.) that demonstrate how the architects applied this palette down to the smallest details of design and interior layout.

More information

New Online Course: CMS Colour Fundamentals

By Nick Harkness

This new CMS set of Interactive colour exercises explores the core aspects of colour terminology. They enhance visual colour, communication and understanding of lightness, chroma, hue and appearance in just 10 practical tasks.

What’s included

Primary Colours / Art Colour Circle / CIE Colour Circle / NCS Colour Circle / Lightness / Hering Triangle / Chroma & Hue / Colour Difference / Colour Difference (Advanced) / After Image

Price: AUD 38

Enroll for CMS Colour Fundamentals

Colour Made Simple is ideal for:

• Large, medium sized, small organisations and Individuals. It enables good colour understanding and the ability to communicate colour issues within a range of departments e.g. Design, Marketing, Production, R &D plus Sales.

• Speaking the same colour language and using the same terminology is critical for product development, creative projects, IP and brand management when colour issues occur.

• New comers to an organisation. CMS represents a fast track into the world of colour measurement for a wide range applications.

• Universities looking to augment course material or university students seeking to deepen their knowledge on this subject over a wide range of academic disciplines

• People with a passion for colour

Find other courses from CMS here

Special offer! 25% discount for ICAB members

Find more information below:

As a nonprofit organisation, run entirely by volunteers and on a very limited budget, we are counting on you to help us continue offering free online Colour Talks, colour related information and accessible colour related events and education. Consider to either become an ICA-Belgium member, or a paid newsletter subscriber. You can also buy ICA a coffee.

This new CMS set of Interactive colour exercises explore the core aspects of colour terminology. They enhance visual colour, communication and understanding of lightness, chroma, hue and appearance in just 10 practical tasks.

What’s included

• Primary Colours

• Art Colour Circle

• CIE Colour Circle

• NCS Colour Circle

• Lightness

• Hering Triangle

• Chroma & Hue

• Colour Difference

• Colour Difference (Advanced)

• After Image

Price: $38

Enroll for CMS Colour Fundamentals

Colour Made Simple is ideal for:

• Large, medium sized, small organisations and Individuals. It enables good colour understanding and the ability to communicate colour issues within a range of departments e.g. Design, Marketing, Production, R &D plus Sales.

• Speaking the same colour language and using the same terminology is critical for product development, creative projects, IP and brand management when colour issues occur.

• New comers to an organisation. CMS represents a fast track into the world of colour measurement for a wide range applications.

• Universities looking to augment course material or university students seeking to deepen their knowledge on this subject over a wide range of academic disciplines

• People with a passion for colour

Find other courses from CMS here

This article, which proposes a color-centered approach to recent exhibitions, is the fourth in a series commissioned by the ICA-Belgium. Before moving on to the follow-up of the article Parisian Colors, here’s a little interlude to enjoy the European Month of Photography, especially in Brussels.

So, I’ve selected three photographers featured in the 10th Photo Brussels Festival:

• Jean-Bernard Métais, La Couleur du temps, at Galerie La Forest Divonne (8 January – 22 February 2026)

• Pixy Liao, People in Mirror are closer than they appear, Galerie Stieglitz19 (15 January – 21 February 2026)

• Jesse Willems, LUZ, Schönfeld Gallery (11 January – 28 February)

The Color of Time

The Color of Time, or the iris of wine? If the eyes are the mirror of the soul, do Jean-Bernard Métais’s photos give us access to the soul of wine?

Jean-Bernard Métais is both a winemaker and an artist. For 50 years, he has been photographing the vats of his wine, capturing its evolution at different stages of maturation. If he doesn’t (yet) endow this beverage with a soul, he nonetheless considers it a being in its own right. Indeed, since 1989, his photos have been archived under the title “The Births of the Wine Being.”

And for color lovers, this series presented at Galerie La Forest Divonne is a delight. Yet the artist claims no aesthetic agenda - only the poetry of the living.

The three selected photos particularly draw me in through the quality of their contrasts, the richness of their tones, and the subtle variety within formal simplicity.

A personal selection

The first one offers a very light blue background at the center of the vat, gradually enriched with sparkles of a deeper blue. Mauve ramifications emerge from the heart, darkening and densifying toward the periphery until they intertwine with the coppery dendrites at the edges, progressively compartmentalizing the organic form. The copper-mauve harmony within a range of blues is particularly successful.

Imagine the photo rotated 90° and cropped as a rectangle: the magic of the iris vanishes, revealing a naive tree against a sky. The rigorous choice of a disk inscribed in a uniform square precisely neutralizes any figurative anecdote, any scale reference, and ensures the series’ coherence.

Built on the same principle, the second places greater emphasis on the coppery edge of the vat. It becomes a flamboyant setting for a light violet heart. The smooth, minimally nuanced center cracks at the periphery like sun-baked dried earth. A Bordeaux red traces the fissures and draws symmetrical wings on the right lateral structure, adding texture and variety. An oblong black point, placed on this axis of symmetry, punctuates the image and breaks its predictability.

The last work remains enigmatic: reflections suggesting a golden sphere, immediately contradicted by the pink-edged liquid at the bottom; a lighter film floats there and marbles the surface. Three dark squares discreetly structure the whole, bathed in warm tones - light pink, golden yellow-orange, clay browns up to deep brown. It’s simply beautiful.

One downside: on large enlargements, JPEG compression artifacts alter the finesse of the organic textures, which are essential to this visual poetry.

People in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

A smile instantly lights up the visitor’s face as they push open the door of this small gallery on rue Saint-Georges. Is it the intimacy of the space or the immediate warmth with which Pixy Liao (@bloodypixy) welcomes you? According to her, if her work makes you smile, you’ve grasped its essence.

The exhibition notice - “these performative self-portraits, sometimes risqué, overturn traditional gender hierarchies” - places the artist firmly in the zeitgeist, but that’s not what draws me in. What touches me is the offbeat humor, the Wes Anderson-like colorful universe, the assumed vintage feel, and above all this complicit invitation the artist extends to the viewer, welcomed into her intimate theater.

Three photos

The first one unsettles me: Pixy behind a large hexagonal flask, as if offering her head in a jar. The unease perhaps comes from the partial duplication of the face on either side, crossed by a central shadow. I love the vertical jade reflection to the left of the face, a chromatic echo of a window likely out of frame. The coppery tone of the body elsewhere makes a beautiful chromatic transition with Jean-Bernard Métais’s work seen earlier.

The second instantly evokes Wes Anderson: centered composition, restricted pastel palette, surprise and invention. The model’s simultaneously provocative and chaste pose in front of her fake-voyeur companion is amusing. Well done Pixy! - including this photo in the festival program, you hooked me! I love these thermal bath atmospheres; we find them again in another photograph where bright yellow basins serve as a counterpoint to a huge painted mountain backdrop. Martin Parr is not far away.

The third surprises again: a couple - seen from behind - dazzled by an invisible spectacle, sharing a complicit wonder. Deliberate overexposure, cheesy pose… We slip into a world of idyllic love; everything is staged, we’re not fooled, and yet it works.

LUZ

Jesse Willems’s work is not explicitly mentioned in the 10th Brussels Photo Festival program, even though Schönfeld Gallery is listed.

No matter - I take the liberty of talking about it here. These abstract photographs may puzzle fans of more traditional photography, though this kind of approach is far from new. One can sense a certain kinship with Saul Leiter, Ernst Haas, or Franco Fontana, with that same taste for composition and color.

Three abstract compositions

The first composition grabs attention: where does reality end and the artist’s intervention begin? The black shapes, likely shadows on a light granulated floor, offer a very graphic contrast. A pale orange T, slightly tilted, structures and divides the image unevenly. Two smaller shapes of the same color echo each other on either side, balancing the whole. The top and bottom dialogue: a large, slightly blurred bluish-gray triangle counterbalances a more mineral, sharper elongated shape in the same hue. The inversion of black/white contrasts at the right edge further energizes the composition. The bluish-gray / pale orange contrast against black and white signs is particularly seductive. One senses the photographer’s delight in the colour that emerges from everyday life.

The second composition, immediately very different, is all curves and roundness. The shapes extend onto the frame, changing color as they do. At the top left, a vivid blue loses its intensity as it crosses the frame, as if yielding its chromatic strength to the red curve outlining its contour. On the right, a tonic orange pushes the gaze out of the frame, only to bring it back lower toward a complex ultramarine blue shape. Orange/blue, the great classic, works wonderfully here in what seems to be a maquette of cut paper illuminated, generating shadows, openings, and lights.

The third composition, magnificently simple, evokes 1950s architecture or posters: black/white contrasts in dynamic curves, and a single color - a mahogany red - that bursts out of the frame.

In each image, a border of varying width seems to separate interior from exterior, affirming the artist’s intent to suggest a potential “beyond the frame.”

In conclusion

These three photographers to whet your appetite: a photo festival is meant to be savored.

At Galerie La Forest Divonne, the hanging of La Couleur du temps is particularly well done. Games and dialogues unfold between glass sculptures and Jean-Bernard Métais’s photographs, subtly suggesting to the less-informed visitor a link to the world of winemaking.

Don’t miss the small Galerie Stieglitz19, where Pixy Liao’s fabricated universe will charm you.

The Rivoli complex, home to Galerie Schönfeld, is a must for Brussels art lovers. You can’t walk through it without encountering a work that speaks to you. Several galleries are participating in the 10th Photo Brussels. Don’t pass by Jesse Willems’s compositions, where photography becomes pure abstraction extending onto the frame.

So go explore the venues of the 10th Photo Brussels or any photographic exhibition this February!

Last call for our online Colour Talk - there are only a few places left. Read about our new Colour Circle Book Club and a guided tour in Brussels.

We thank you for reading us in 38 countries!

Warm greetings from Belgium,

-your ICA-Belgium team

Sunday Morning Colour Talk with Juan Serra Lluch

This Sunday, 8 February 2026, at 10 AM CET, join us for our next colour talk, this time with Juan Serra Lluch, PhD architect, Full Professor at the School of Architecture (ETSA) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), and Sub-Dean of Research, who will present his book, Color for Architects.

Colour is essential to architecture yet often misunderstood and overlooked in education; this engaging, richly illustrated volume brings clarity to colour theory by seamlessly blending theory, practice, and real-world examples, offering designers practical tools to confidently use colour in architectural design.

There will be time for Q&A, we invite you to join the conversation.

The event is free but it requires registration, places are limited to 100.

There are only a few spaces left! Waiting list is available.

More information & Registration

Introducing the Colour Circle Book Club

Reading, sharing, and exploring the world of colour together.

At ICA-Belgium we believe that colour becomes richer when we explore it collectively. That’s why we’re launching the Colour Circle - ICA-Belgium’s Colour Book Club - a space where you can discover inspiring books on colour, exchange insights, and reflect on how colour shapes our work, our thinking, and our daily lives.

Each session focuses on a selected book: sometimes a classic, sometimes a surprising new title. We read, discuss, and review together - always with an open mind and a playful spirit. Whether you’re a colour professional, an artist, a designer, or simply someone who loves the poetry and psychology of colour, you’re warmly invited to join.

The Colour Circle Book Club is designed to be:

• Accessible - no prior expertise required

• Interactive - conversations, reflections, and shared discoveries

• Inspiring - from colour theory to perception, from art to science

• Community‑building - connecting people who see the world through a colourful lens

• Private - for ICA-Belgium members and paid subscribers (monthly or yearly) - with hybrid attendance, online and in Belgium.

Whether you are on the other side of the world or in Belgium, we plan to find a way to connect and come together.

For those in Belgium (or willing to come for a visit), we hope to gather at our members’ homes (so we can, at the same time, have the opportunity to enjoy each other’s colour book collections), while allowing anyone who is not in Belgium, to join online.

We look forward to reading together and letting colour spark new conversations.

Let us know what colour related books you would like to read and discuss. We will try to invite the authors to join, when possible.

The first Colour Circle Book Club Meeting will take place on 3 May 2026, with hybrid attendance.

The exact time and place will be communicated at a later point.

Our first book will be Color for Architects by Juan Serra Lluch.

Find out more about the Colour Circle Book Club:.

To celebrate the start of our Colour Book Club, we are partnering with Routledge, offering you 20% Off all Routledge Classics Books until the end of March 2026, with the code AFFQ12026.

20% Off all Routledge Classics Books with Free Standard Shipping.

Code: AFFQ12026

Offer ends: March 31st 2026

Routledge Classics | Celebrating 25 Years with 20% Off All Routledge Classics – Free Standard Shipping

*Transparency Disclosure: ICA-Belgium is an affiliate of Routledge. We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through our links, at no cost to you, which helps support our mission.

ICA-Belgium 2025 Activity Report

Thank you to everyone who contributed! You can download the report as a PDF here.

Colour Exhibitions on our radar

Colour and Momentum - Guided tour by curator Kinga Popovics

Liszt Institute Brussels, Thursday, February 12 from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm

The exhibition Colour & Momentum at the Liszt Institute Brussels brings together five Hungarian artists from two generations, united by abstraction and a shared sensitivity to perception.

Through deliberate juxtapositions, the works begin to speak - not loudly, but with clarity - inviting viewers into a quiet yet active dialogue. Glass and Lego, presence and absence, organic form and constructed systems unfold side by side, revealing how art resists formulas and fixed interpretations.

Exhibiting artists: Zsófi Barabás, István Felsmann, Bernát Haupt, Márton Nemes & Bella Pál

Guided by the curator Kinga Popovics, discover how movement, material, and perception shape our experience - and why seeing is never passive.

More information about the exhibition: https://culture.hu/en/brussels/events/colur-and-momentum

Free Registration

Let us know if you will be attending the guided tour, we could meet for coffee afterwards. Several ICA-Belgium members are already planning to attend.

ICA-Belgium members and yearly subscribers - send us your colour related news! We are happy to share about your colour-related work in the newsletter and our website.

ICA-Belgium is a community of colour lovers that share a common interest in colour, spanning the fields of art, design, architecture, science, industry, education, linguistics, philosophy, history…

Join us and get to know other colour professionals and enthusiasts from all around the world (yes, we have international membership!), share about your work, develop opportunities for collaboration, build connections and contribute to a dynamic colour platform.

As a nonprofit organisation, run entirely by volunteers and on a very limited budget, we are counting on you to help us continue offering free online Colour Talks, colour related information and accessible colour related events and education. Consider to either become an ICA-Belgium member, or a paid newsletter subscriber. You can also buy ICA a coffee.

Design by Inez Michiels

You can download the Report as PDF here.

At ICA-Belgium we believe that colour becomes richer when we explore it collectively. That’s why we’re launching the Colour Circle - ICA-Belgium’s Colour Book Club - a space where you can discover inspiring books on colour, exchange insights, and reflect on how colour shapes our work, our thinking, and our daily lives.

Each session focuses on a selected book: sometimes a classic, sometimes a surprising new title. We read, discuss, and review together - always with an open mind and a playful spirit. Whether you’re a colour professional, an artist, a designer, or simply someone who loves the poetry and psychology of colour, you’re warmly invited to join.

The Colour Circle Book Club is designed to be:

• Accessible - no prior expertise required

• Interactive - conversations, reflections, and shared discoveries

• Inspiring - from colour theory to perception, from art to science

• Community‑building - connecting people who see the world through a colourful lens

• Private - for ICA-Belgium members and paid subscribers (monthly or yearly) - with hybrid attendance, (online & in person in Belgium).

Whether you are on the other side of the world or in Belgium, we plan to find a way to connect and come together.

For those in Belgium (or willing to come for a visit), we hope to gather in a smaller circle at our members’ homes (so we can, at the same time, have the opportunity to enjoy each other’s colour book collections), while inviting anyone who can’t be present in person, to join us online.

We look forward to reading together and letting colour spark new conversations.

Let us know what colour related books you would like to read and discuss. We will try to invite the authors to join, when possible.

Subscribe now

The first Colour Circle Book Club Meeting will take place on 3 May 2026, with hybrid attendance.

The exact time is to be confirmed.

Our first book will be Color for Architects by Juan Serra Lluch. Juan spoke about his book in the Sunday Morning Colour Talk on the 8th of February. See the recording below:

You can buy the book here:

Neue Galerie / Standaard Boekhandel / Biblio / Architectura & Natura

French version, published by Le Moniteur: Utiliser la couleur dans un projet d’architecture, can be bought here:

Libris.nl / Athenaeum Scheltema / Filigranes / Le Moniteur

To celebrate the start of our Colour Book Club, we are partnering with Routledge, offering you 20% Off all Routledge Classics Books until the end of March 2026.

20% Off all Routledge Classics Books with Free Standard Shipping.

Code: AFFQ12026

Offer ends: March 31st 2026

Routledge Classics | Celebrating 25 Years with 20% Off All Routledge Classics – Free Standard Shipping

*Transparency Disclosure: ICA-Belgium is an affiliate of Routledge, Libris and Atheneum Scheltema. We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through these links, at no cost to you, which helps support our mission.

Our approach to book buying recommendations

ICA-Belgium is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the art and science of colour. To support our mission, we plan to participate in curated affiliate programs with partners who share our values.

Supporting an Ethical Literary Ecosystem: We have intentionally chosen not to partner with major corporate monopolies. Instead, we collaborate with:

• Independent Marketplaces: We wish to partner with platforms that directly share their profits with local, independent bookstores.

• Specialist Academic Publishers: We link directly to Routledge to provide you with the most accurate scientific and artistic research.

How it works: When you purchase a book through our links, the association may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. This micro-funding is vital for an NGO like ours, run entirely by volunteers - it helps fund our events, educational projects and support running costs. We only recommend titles that meet professional standards for relevance to the field of colour.

Thank you for supporting independent booksellers and our colourful mission!

Subscribe now

Immerse yourself into the colours of Parisian exhibitions, brought to you through the masterful pen of Vinciane Lacroix. Don’t miss our online February Colour Talk with Juan Serra Lluch, the registration is open.

Warm greetings from Belgium,

-your ICA-Belgium team

Sunday Morning Colour Talk with Juan Serra Lluch

Sunday mornings are great for drinking coffee or tea in your pyjamas while listening to ICA-Belgium’s Colour Talks!

On Sunday, 8 February 2026, at 10 AM CET, join us for our next colour talk, this time with Juan Serra Lluch, PhD architect, Full Professor at the School of Architecture (ETSA) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), and Sub-Dean of Research, who will present his book, Color for Architects.

Colour is essential to architecture yet often misunderstood and overlooked in education; this engaging, richly illustrated volume brings clarity to colour theory by seamlessly blending theory, practice, and real-world examples, offering designers practical tools to confidently use colour in architectural design.

There will be time for Q&A. Jeannette Hanenburg, Inez Michiels and Maja Kaurin invite you to join the conversation.

The event is free but it requires registration, places are limited.

More information & Registration

Neil Parkinson – The Colour Librarian

Webinar by Colour Society of Australia

10 February 2026 7:30 PM, AEDT

Colour Society of Australia invites you to join their first free webinar in 2026, by Neil Parkinson, head of special collections at the Royal College of Art, London, and author of The History of Colour: A Universe of Chromatic Phenomena (2023).

Neil Parkinson is perhaps the only known colour librarian in the UK. As head of special collections at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, his responsibilities include the internationally renowned Colour Reference Library, one of the largest collections of material on colour in the world. The Library embodies seven centuries of colour theory, and includes many rare and beautiful books, alongside colour-related archives and manuscripts. The materials in the Colour Reference Library are as diverse as the subject itself: classic works of theory by Newton, Goethe and Chevreul sit alongside psychological tests, optical illusions and occult texts.

Neil will talk about the challenges of interpreting and organising such a vast and eccentric collection and will discuss some of the different ways its many users, from archaeologists to set designers, approach the subject of colour. He will also outline some of his favourite books on colour, and the many exquisite ways in which the spectrum has been visualised and organised on the printed page.

More Information & Registration

Save the Date

Workshop: Interaction of Colour in Space

Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop, Germany, 27-28 June 2026

In collaboration with Deutsches Farbenzentrum, ICA-Belgium invites architects, designers, artists and all colour lovers to an exceptional two-day workshop at the renowned Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop - a unique setting to explore colour where art, theory, and architecture meet.

Led by two internationally acclaimed experts, the workshop brings together outstanding voices in architectural colour research and practice: Maria Zurbuchen-Henz, architect based in Lausanne and Professor at Haus der Farbe – Fachschule für Gestaltung in Handwerk und Architektur in Zurich, and Juan Serra Lluch, PhD architect, Full Professor at the School of Architecture (ETSA) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and Sub-Dean of Research at ETSA.

Rooted in Josef Albers’s groundbreaking theory of colour interaction, the workshop goes beyond academic discourse to focus on practical, architectural applications. Through hands-on exercises, critical discussion, and applied research, both lecturers offer their distinct interpretations—translating colour theory into spatial experience, material expression, and design strategy.

This is a rare opportunity to engage deeply with colour as an architectural tool, exchange ideas with leading experts, and gain new perspectives that can directly inform design practice.

Find more information about the workshop here.

Places are limited to 25. Register for the waiting list to be among the first to be notified when registration opens.

Waiting List

Call for volunteers

We are always looking for volunteers to help with many parts of running ICA-Belgium: organising events, workshops, developing articles and publications, communication, social media, marketing, sponsorships and funding, photography and video recording...

If you would like to volunteer for ICA-Belgium, please get in touch with us and let us know more about you and how you think you could contribute to ICA-Belgium. As you know, we are a nonprofit organisation, run entirely by volunteers, always looking for ways to grow, develop and connect.

As a nonprofit organisation, run entirely by volunteers and on a very limited budget, we are counting on you to help us continue offering free online Colour Talks, colour related information and accessible colour related events and education. Consider to either become an ICA-Belgium member, or a paid newsletter subscriber. You can also buy ICA a coffee.

In collaboration with Deutsches Farbenzentrum and with the support of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop and the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, ICA-Belgium invites architects, designers, artists and all colour lovers to an exceptional two-day workshop at the renowned Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop - a unique setting to explore colour where art, theory, and architecture meet.

Led by two internationally acclaimed experts, the workshop brings together outstanding voices in architectural colour research and practice: Maria Zurbuchen-Henz, architect based in Lausanne and Professor at Haus der Farbe – Fachschule für Gestaltung in Handwerk und Architektur in Zurich, and Juan Serra, PhD architect, Full Professor at the School of Architecture (ETSA) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and Sub-Dean of Research at ETSA.

Rooted in Josef Albers’s groundbreaking theory of colour interaction, the workshop goes beyond academic discourse to focus on practical, architectural applications. Through hands-on exercises, critical discussion, and applied research, both lecturers offer their distinct interpretations—translating colour theory into spatial experience, material expression, and design strategy.

This is a rare opportunity to engage deeply with colour as an architectural tool, exchange ideas with leading experts, and gain new perspectives that can directly inform design practice.

Tickets

• Member registration (Deutsches Farbenzentrum and ICA Belgium):

  290,00 €

• Normal registration:

  350,00 €

• 4 subsidised student places (see the Open Call bellow):

  40,00 €

Places are limited to 25.

Buy your ticket

With the generous support of the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, we are pleased to announce four subsidised student placements through the Albers Accessibility Awards.

To support the next generation of creative talent and promote the accessibility of high-level colour education, we are offering 4 subsidised spots to full-time students in higher education (including PhD candidates). Successful applicants will receive a significant reduction in tuition, with a subsidised fee of €40.

For the details about the Open Call, please see here:

PROGRAMME

27 June, Saturday

• 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. Introduction and guided tour of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat by Dr. Linda Walther, the director of the museum.

• 1 p.m. - 4 p.m. Workshop by Juan Serra: Albers in Depth: From Homage to the Square to the Cube.

• 7 p.m. - 9 p.m. Aftertalk: a casual chat and drink after the first workshop day. The location will be announced later.

28 June, Sunday

• 11 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Lecture by Maria Zurbuchen-Henz: Polychromy of interior rooms

• 11:30 a.m. - 14:30 a.m. Workshop by Maria Zurbuchen-Henz: Between testing-machine and wonder-box: Experimenting colour-concepts by means of models.

• 3 p.m. - 4 p.m. Public Lecture by Juan Serra: Architectural Spatial Colour Interactions: Albers's Unique Homages to the Square at RIT

• Exhibition of the works produced during the two-day workshops.

WORKSHOPS OVERVIEW

Albers in Depth: From Homage to the Square to the Cube

By Juan Serra

Homages to the Square can be interpreted as exercises of colour layering with surfaces that can act as squares or frames, transparent or opaque, closer or more distant to the observer. In the multiple lectures of one same Homage in depth, we experience the claim for the relativity of colour by Josef Albers, as well different atmospheres, from subtle transitions to marked contrasts.

This hands-on workshop focuses on the transformation of Homages to the Square into homages to the cube, with alternative spatial solutions that refer to the same original. Participants bridge the gap between simulated depth and physical depth, experiencing firsthand how colour interactions evolve when liberated into three-dimensional space.

Contents

• Square in depth. Visual analysis and personal interpretation of colour layering on two-dimensional Homages to the Square exhibited at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop

• Square into Cube, in depth. Colour transfers from two dimensional surfaces into transparent and opaque physical layers. Experimentation with colour mixing by superimpositions and overlapping.

• Cube in depth: Experimenting with lighting effects on physical models, colour transformations and shifts in depth perception.

Between testing-machine and a wonder-box: Experimenting colour-concepts by means of models.

By Maria Zurbuchen-Henz

Polychromy of interior rooms

Colour harmony or colour kitsch, how colourful can architecture be? This introduction is dedicated to the question of how different colours interact, how they can be made to harmonize together or how a colour strategy can be established.

Floor, wall, ceiling – it is worthwhile for architects to explore the great potential of colour in interior design. Should colour strengthen and clarify the architectural form, comment and interpret it in a playful way or even manipulate it? What is certain, however, is that colour design is very important because it has an immediate effect on our senses.

For a better understanding of the spatial phenomena we could ask Le Corbusier. For him, colour in architecture means: “Structuring and dissolving volumes – forming and changing spaces – creating and stimulating spatial moods.”

Workshop

Between testing-machine and wonder-box: experimenting colour-concepts by means of models

The workshop focuses on the eminently architectural question of the relationship between volume, space and colour. In order to approach this question in a playful way, the participants will be able to work directly on shoe-box sized cardboard models with the aim of testing polychromy of interior rooms.

The spatial arrangement of the models is reminiscent of the perspective effect of Josef Albers’s paintings Homage to the square. As a supplement to the experimentations on the first day, the coloured models enable us to take another step forward to the third dimension.

Contents

• Comparisons between painterly and architectural design principles: perception of colour in two-dimensional pictorial space and in three-dimensional architectural space (Josef Albers, Le Corbusier, Luis Barragán)

• Experimenting with colour and light effects on models (colour contrast, light-dark contrast, body colour and light colour, sharpness versus blurring, light and shadow)

• Architectural colour palettes and strategies

Materials for the Workshop

Materials available at the Museum:

Cardboard sets for the models (28 x 14 x 14cm), coloured paper strips

Please bring with you:

Little cutting mat, cutter, ruler, set square, adhesive tape, white glue and stick, pencil and eraser.

Bios

Maria Zurbuchen-Henz is architect in Lausanne an professor in Haus der Farbe Fachschule für Gestaltung in Handwerk und Architektur Zürich in Switzerland. She conveys colour culture in public spaces and buildings and leads workshops on the subject of colour and space at Hochschule der Medien Stuttgart (2026/2024), Pavillon Le Corbusier Zürich (2021), Universiteit Antwerpen (2019), Université de Strasbourg (2017/2016).

maria.zurbuchen@mbarchitectes.ch | www.mbarchitectes.ch | www.hausderfarbe.ch

Juan Serra is PhD architect, Full Professor in the School of Architecture (ETSA) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in Spain, and Sub-Dean of Research at ETSA. He is co-chair of the Study Group on Environmental Color Design of the International Color Association (AIC), and a member of the Color Research Group in Architecture of the Heritage Restoration Institute (IRP-UPV). Editor in Chief of VLC Architecture: Research Journal (UPV), and member of the editorial board of Color Research and Application (Wiley). He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Munsell Color Science Laboratory (RIT 2023) and visiting researcher in Oxford, Milan, Paris, Lisbon and Lima. He is a regular contributor to the AIC Color Congresses, and the Architectural Graphic Expression International Congresses (EGA). He has been researcher in competitive national and international projects about color restoration, color integration of buildings, color perception in interior architecture, color for wellbeing and performance, and neuroarchitecture. He has published numerous papers in indexed research journals and is author of the book “Color for Architects” (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019).

juaserl1@upv.edu.es | Orcid | Grupo de Investigación del Color en Arquitectura IRP |

Buy your ticket

Where to stay in Bottrop?

Ramada by Wyndham Bottrop City is within a walking distance to the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop.

On Sunday, 8 February 2026, our guest was Juan Serra Lluch, PhD architect, Full Professor at the School of Architecture (ETSA) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), and Sub-Dean of Research. He presented his book, Color for Architects.

Colour is essential to architecture yet often misunderstood and overlooked in education; this engaging, richly illustrated volume brings clarity to colour theory by seamlessly blending theory, practice, and real-world examples, offering designers practical tools to confidently use colour in architectural design.

Colour is an integral part of architectural design, yet it remains one of its most enigmatic components. Despite its impact, formal colour theory is often overlooked in architectural curricula, leaving architects to puzzle out the hows and whys of which colours to select and how they interact, complement or clash.

Color for Architects is profusely illustrated and provides a clear, concise primer on colour for designers of every kind. This latest volume in our Architecture Briefs series combines the theoretical and practical, providing the basics on which to build a fuller mastery of this essential component of design. A wealth of built examples, exercises, and activities allows students to apply their learning of colour to real-world situations.

If you’d like to read the book, there are English and French versions available.

You can buy the English book here:

Neue Galerie / Standaard Boekhandel / Biblio / Architectura & Natura

French version, published by Le Moniteur: Utiliser la couleur dans un projet d’architecture, can be bought here:

Libris.nl / Athenaeum Scheltema / Filigranes / Le Moniteur

*ICA-Belgium is an affiliate of Routledge, Libris and Atheneum Scheltema. We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through these links, at no cost to you, which helps support our mission.

ABOUT

Juan Serra is PhD architect, Full Professor in the School of Architecture (ETSA) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in Spain, and Sub-Dean of Research at ETSA. He is co-chair of the Study Group on Environmental Colour Design of the International Color Association (AIC), and member of the Colour Research Group in Architecture of the Heritage Restoration Institute (IRP-UPV). Editor in Chief of VLC Architecture: Research Journal (UPV), and member of the editorial board of Colour Research and Application (Wiley). He has been a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Munsell Color Science Laboratory (RIT 2023) and visiting researcher in Oxford, Milan, Paris, Lisbon and Lima. He is a regular contributor to the AIC Colour Congresses, and the Architectural Graphic Expression International Congresses (EGA). He has been a researcher in competitive national and international projects about color restoration, colour integration of buildings, colour perception in interior architecture, colour for wellbeing and performance, and neuroarchitecture. He has published numerous papers in indexed research journals and is author of the book Color for Architects (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019).

juaserl1@upv.edu.es | Orcid | Grupo de Investigación del Color en Arquitectura IRP

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• John Singer Sargent. Éblouir Paris, at the Musée d’Orsay

• Kandinsky. La musique des couleurs, at the Philharmonie de Paris

• Gerhard Richter, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

• And the Fondation Cherqui (optical and kinetic art).

This article will be split into two parts to respect your reading time. Some exhibitions may already be closed by the time you read this (Sargent closed its doors on January 11, 2026), but these artists’ works travel widely: watch for future opportunities! Digital resources remain: follow the links in the captions for access to high-resolution images.

The presentation order follows the chronological sequence of the artists’ births. But what interests me above all is each artist’s chromatic audacity or signature, within the context of their era. Note that only the Sargent exhibition focuses on a specific period (his Parisian years, 1874–1884).

Preamble

Approaching an artist through the lens of color requires reliable reproductions. Digital photography, with its wider gamut than print, seems advantageous at first glance. Yet it remains subject to sensor characteristics (different from our vision), the lighting spectrum, and post-processing.

As an example, here are three reproductions of the same Kandinsky painting that I have never seen in person. Which one to trust? Excessive saturation may signal alteration, but how to know if it is faithful to the original? Framing can also be an issue. Faced with these three versions, the third seems to me the most accurate—but what if only one is available? Institutional sources inspire confidence, though they are not infallible.

In these posts, therefore, I prioritize reproductions that come closest to my perception during visits. If a Wikimedia Commons image seems off, I prefer my own photo—even if influenced by ambient lighting.

John Singer Sargent

Why is this American painter, born in Florence in 1856 and died in London in 1925, so little known in France, Belgium, and even continental Europe?

An American in Paris

American? The Brussels critic wrote in 1879: “American by birth, French by brush.” Banned from Paris after training there and making friends—Monet, Degas, and Pissarro—he vanished from the European artistic radar. Too audacious in one painting, the portrait of Madame X? Retouched in an attempt to erase the scandal of a slipping strap, it now graces the exhibition poster.

This Salon virtuoso caused a scandal in 1884. Not just for the slipping strap and sensual pose - an invitation to debauchery? - but also for skin deemed cadaverous, artificial. And yet, what a masterpiece: pale skin with opalescent nuances against a black dress heightened by reflections that outline its distinguished cut. What haughty bearing, what personality in this profile emphasized by lips of supposedly vulgar red! Why did this offended painter then decide to leave Paris for London rather than join the Salons des refusés? The answer: “follow the money”! He indeed left Paris for London, where a more tolerant aristocratic clientele awaited and propelled him to the top.

The painting Mrs Henry White echoes Madame X. They could be called Mrs White and Mrs Black, both for the parallel conception and the opposition of their impact on the painter’s career.

Moreover, Mrs Henry White could fit into my #9 white challenge. Sargent brings transparency to the lace, shine to the satin, stiffness or fluidity to the overskirt and skirt. Behind her, the orange of the chair placed as a tonic color and echoed in the fan and on the lips creates eye circulation around the model. Subtle and effective.

Light

Sargent is not merely the painter of gilded transatlantic bourgeoisie. Certainly, these commissioned portraits were a source of income and impress by their number (nearly 900), but the painter’s talent shines equally in his personal research, especially in translating light.

For example, The Table under the Pergola, for its treatment of natural light. Admire the white tablecloth, spotted with sun that, traversed by it, turns ochre while reflecting rays from the beaten earth. And the glasses in the foreground: a few well-placed touches say it all—volume, reflections, and the irresistible urge to share an aperitif with someone.

As for The Birthday Party, it demonstrates mastery of artificial light as much as masterful composition dominated by a hypnotic red that strikes at first glance. One guesses a light source behind the man’s silhouette. Did he need to be anonymized to deserve such facial blur? Or is it simply a technique to focus attention on the female model, whose hair melts into shadow while her profile emerges.

The Blue Hour

At a time when John Singer Sargent was still little discussed, in the #7 challenge, the palette of the magic hour, I presented two works including Carnation, Lily, Lily and Rose, barely later (1885) and unfortunately absent from the exhibition.

Visitors can nevertheless savor this exquisite palette in the painting In the Luxembourg Gardens. It translates the enchantment of the gaze at that moment when blues gain brilliance, reds depth, and pinks softness. What a delight this stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens! Do you feel the evening warmth?

In the close-up below, appreciate the accuracy of the flower tones and admire how they rhythm the painting, passing through the lady’s fan.

European Inspirations

John Singer Sargent may have been born to American parents, but he did not set foot in America until age 20, in 1876. He spent his entire youth traveling in Europe and beyond.

Before Paris, he trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Beyond anatomy, composition, and classical drawing, he surely carried Michelangelo and Raphael’s teachings in his memory.

Presented at the Salon in 1883, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit still intrigues today with its original composition, the gigantism of the Japanese vases, the little girls’ gazes, and the slightly bluish light in the background on the last third’s axis, opening the dark part of the painting. Doesn’t that remind you of something?

Who wouldn’t see the influence of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) in his mythical painting Las Meninas? Sargent did not hide his admiration for this great Spanish master, making copies of several paintings. Here, he is criticized for an overly loose execution, perhaps too synthetic touches. Yet this style brings him closer to the Impressionists of his time.

Rhythms and Music

The painting Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver will serve as a transition to the Kandinsky exhibition at the Philharmonie. Sargent was also a talented pianist. According to the exhibition notice, he was a regular at theaters and concert halls.

What place does this black-and-white painting have in a color chronicle? First, black and white are, of course, colors. But the remarkable point here is the play of contrasts created by these values. Look bottom left: silhouettes detached against the scores lead the contrast in a swirling dance. The dark instruments take over in the middle to soar into clearer notes higher up right. Perspective then stretches the scores in a centrifugal movement that calms in the rhythm of the tiered seats. What composition! Add vivid colors and you would have a Delaunay, created much later.

To Conclude Éblouir Paris

So why is John Singer Sargent so little known in continental Europe? The answer is simple: it is mainly the United States and Great Britain that have adopted and collected him. Fortunately, European and American institutions collaborate to present some works in exhibitions like this one. Let’s hope for more! Some will say Sargent was certainly virtuoso but not innovative enough compared to the Impressionists of his time. For my part, I am dazzled by his faculty of synthesis, his original compositions, his mastery of light.

Kandinsky

La musique des couleurs (The Music of Colors), the title of the exhibition at the Philharmonie, runs until February 1, 2026. It highlights the fundamental place of music in Kandinsky’s life - his daily routine, his artistic calling, and his evolution.

Headphones playing mainly the music that marked the artist offer an immersive journey. This device brings us closer to the man himself. Kandinsky was a synesthete: auditory stimulation automatically and involuntarily triggered visual stimulation in the form of colors. So during the visit, you too will experience this dual stimulation: sounds and colors.

The scenography succeeds in immersing us in the total art that Kandinsky cherished. Here paintings, there a theatrical installation, further along an animation, then a cabinet blending personal objects and the painter’s tools (including his palette!), all steeped in the music of the century.

Color in Kandinsky’s Work

To explore color in Kandinsky through the works in the The Music of Colors exhibition, you can follow the immersive scenography of the Philharmonie… or choose another path. Adopting a chronological perspective makes it possible to grasp the slow and profound evolution that leads from figuration to pure abstraction - the one we most spontaneously associate with the artist. Although abstraction now dominates our image of Kandinsky, it represents the culmination of a long maturation - stylistic, technical, and spiritual. Each medium he explored (woodcut, tempera, oil, watercolor…) played a decisive role: by imposing its own constraints, it helped forge a distinctive style that Kandinsky consciously chose to preserve and carry forward into other techniques, even once those constraints no longer applied. So before going further, let’s look at how this process actually manifests in his work.

Pictorial Techniques

The Music of Colors exhibition offers a wide range of the pictorial techniques explored by the artist: woodcut, watercolor, tempera, oil on cardboard or canvas, at varying degrees of completion.

Kandinsky’s first wood engravings date from 1902. Woodcut requires playing with strong contrasts (black/white), managing negative (black) and positive (white) spaces, deciding what is ground and what is form - or sowing confusion between the two. The size and shape of the gouge used to carve the wood are additional constraints; they determine line thickness and textural elements. All of this can be perfectly observed in the engraving below from 1907.

The tempera paintings on colored cardboard presented in the Russia in Memory room seem to have incorporated the stylistic form found in woodcut. Indeed, the painter treats the cardboard ground as if it were wood: he leaves it bare in places, thus delimiting the forms. Occasionally, colored touches, like gouge strokes, create textural effects. This stylistic transfer can be observed, for example, in Song (1906).

Traces of black lines delimiting forms still remain in the oil painting Improvisation 3 (1909). Note the figurative forms treated rarely in flat areas, more often hatched. Shades often close to each other, like pink and red or nuances of blue, are thus juxtaposed within the form. Sometimes, in these hatchings, a strong contrast of tones: turquoise within a bright yellow, which recalls the contrast created by the turquoise rider. Many paintings from the same period bear this signature: very vivid and contrasted colors, hatchings, a few lines to distinguish the forms.

From Figuration to Abstraction

The stylistic periods of Kandinsky, as proposed by Selena Mattei in Art Majeur, are marked by his places of residence. They unfold like a taut thread from figuration to pure abstraction, preceded by an incubating period.

Youth

Kandinsky’s youth, between Odessa and Moscow, seems to have nourished his artistic soul.

Kandinsky (1866-1944), born into a cultivated bourgeois family, was introduced very early to drawing and painting. Music was also part of his education. From the age of eight he studied solfège and piano. Later he would take up the cello, but drawing remained his first passion.

Do you remember your travels at the age of three? Kandinsky, for his part, said he was impressed by the colors and images of the great Italian cities he visited. It was also color that fascinated him when, every year during his adolescence, he went to Moscow with his father.

He nevertheless embarked on law studies, as his milieu presumably expected - studies that he enjoyed. In 1889, at the age of 23, on an anthropological expedition to the Vologda province, 470 km north of Moscow, he filled notebooks with sketches. He immersed himself in colors, folk music, popular culture. Artistic concerns already seemed as important to him as the scholarly purpose of his trip.

The Shock (1896)

During an Impressionist exhibition in Moscow in 1896, Kandinsky discovered Monet’s haystacks. In reality, he did not see haystacks but an explosion of colors detached from any object.

In December of the same year: the shock initiated by the Monet paintings repeated itself, even more intensely. At a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, Kandinsky experienced one of his most powerful synesthetic moments: the sounds transformed into colors to the point of dazzling and overwhelming him. This man who would have become a professor of political economy at the University of Dorpat then decided to embrace the career of painter. He enrolled in artistic studies in Munich.

Thus Kandinsky came to pictorial art rather late, in his thirties. His first work—identified as such—The Port of Odessa, presented as a preamble, dates from 1898 (he was 32). Clearly, he knew how to paint.

Early Period

This shock thus inaugurated the early period (1896-1908), known as the Munich period, identified as the first characterized by a personal style. This period features figurative paintings influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism - landscapes and urban scenes rendered in vivid colors, yet still anchored to observable motifs - alongside the woodcuts shown earlier and the tempera works.

In this sketch, the woodcut-derived style is evident above all in the deliberate preservation of bare areas on the ochre canvas, as described earlier in the Pictorial Techniques section.

This period is also marked by encounters that seem decisive to me. Here is a biographical excerpt:

• 1897 Enrolled in Anton Azbé’s school. Met Jawlensky.

• 1900 Student of Franz Stuck at the Royal Academy of Munich at the same time as Paul Klee.

• 1902 Taught at the “Phalanx” school where Gabriele Münter was his student.

From 1903 onward, Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter undertook numerous trips: Vienna, Venice, Odessa, Moscow, Berlin. Together, in Paris (1906-1907), they discovered the avant-garde: Matisse and the Fauves, heralding the next period.

Fauve Period

The German period known as Fauve/Expressionist (1908-1914) is characterized by a chromatic explosion, simplified and expressive forms, and the birth in 1911 of the artists’ group Der Blaue Reiter.

I particularly like the paintings (1908-1913) inspired by the Bavarian Alps near Murnau, where Kandinsky acquired a house. In this one, almost every line defining a form has disappeared. Even more audacious, certain parts blend into the background: the hollow of the back and the cow’s neck no longer have any boundary, so that the cow does not appear directly. We move further and further away from reality: what cow would be spotted with khaki, bright yellow, orange, or purplish red?

Music as a Model

In 1911, during this same period, Kandinsky wrote On the Spiritual in Art, and Painting in Particular, a theoretical work on art. He notably sets out the connections between painting and music.

Kandinsky distinguishes three categories of works according to their degree of subjectivity and spontaneity: impressions, improvisations, and compositions.

Impressions (1909–1912) are immediate reactions to what presents itself to him: landscapes, concerts, events. Forms are still recognizable but stylized, color and line dominate the motif. In Impression III (Concert) of 1911, one recognizes the piano and the audience, once familiar with the sketches below. Is the music that large yellow mass? No matter, we enter abstraction.

Improvisations (1909–1914), for their part, are the spontaneous expression of internal, unconscious, even spiritual emotions. They are dynamic abstract forms, but residual narrative traces persist, such as the tree in the painting below.

The painting entitled Fugue is referred as a controlled improvisation, according to a handwritten note by the artist.

Compositions (1910–1939), on the other hand, are complex, matured, elaborated syntheses with preparatory sketches. They express a deep “inner necessity.”

The Apocalypse (All Saints) series, created between 1911 and 1914, is part of these compositions. It expresses the artist’s spiritual anxiety but aims to be positive. It announces the end of materialism and the advent of a new spiritual age through abstract art. Personally, in the painting below, I see more a colored chaos than an optimistic synthesis.

Kandinsky would continue to create Compositions in his later stylistic periods.

Beyond these formal categories, Kandinsky thinks of color “as music,” rich in analogies (timbre, registers, chords) - though his synesthesia avoids any rigid chromatic solfège, remaining a personal inner cartography, fully coherent for him. Yellow, for instance, resonates with the bright, often aggressive tone of a trumpet; deep blue, with a cello or the profound shades of an organ.

Total Art

In 1911, alongside this same Fauve/Expressionist period, Kandinsky co-founded the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group with Franz Marc. This led to a true editorial project of total art: the Almanach der Blaue Reiter (1912), which brought together essays, reproductions of works from various eras and cultures, musical scores, and more - an anthology reflecting a shared spiritual conception of art across disciplines. The exhibition includes a film on the genesis of this almanac.

In parallel, and as a deeply personal counterpoint to the collaborative spirit of the Almanach, Kandinsky conceived Klänge (Sounds / Resonances, 1913), an artist’s book that functions as a poetic manifesto. It comprises prose poems written entirely by him, set in carefully designed typography and accompanied by his own woodcuts - all working together as a visual score that directly mirrors his synesthetic experience. Through the rhythm and sonic quality of the words in his poems, combined with the visual impact of the prints and page layout, Kandinsky seeks to share this synesthesia with the reader, inviting them to perceive the fusion of sound, word, image, and color as he does: total art embodied in the form of a single book.

Below is one of these colored wood engravings from Klänge, depicting a rider - an element dear to Kandinsky and a recurring figurative motif in his work.

Kandinsky also explores the synthesis of theater–painting–music during this period. The Watercolor for Violet (Picture II) (1914) below, bears witness to this quest. Note that in the Centre Pompidou digital version, the form intended to be violet clearly shifts toward garnet - a noticeable chromatic discrepancy which strikingly contradicts the very title of the work! With watercolor, Kandinsky develops a distinct style: forms outlined in India ink, given volume and depth through colored gradients that emerge naturally with the addition of water. He would later adopt this same principle in his oil paintings.

But the war turned everything upside down: forced to return to Russia in 1914, Kandinsky entered a more restrained and geometric phase.

Russian Period (1915–1921)

The outbreak of the First World War brought an inevitable rupture - not merely emotional, but concrete and inescapable. Forced to leave Germany, Kandinsky returned to Russia. This marked the beginning of his Russian period (1915–1921), during which his works became more geometric, influenced by constructivism and suprematism. Nevertheless, burdened by numerous cultural and administrative duties, Kandinsky’s output diminished noticeably. Figuration also re-emerged in his work, as can be seen in the watercolor below.

In 1922, an invitation to join the Bauhaus reignited his creativity in a new and stimulating environment.

Bauhaus Period (1922–1933)

Kandinsky is thus called to teach in Germany at the Bauhaus, an avant-garde school of architecture and applied arts. Under political pressure, the Bauhaus moved several times: from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, then to Berlin in 1932, before being dissolved in 1933. Kandinsky followed along.

The Bauhaus Period (1922–1933) is marked by strict geometrization (circles, triangles, straight lines), initially pure colors then more subtle ones, compositions influenced by Klee and Mondrian, but always expressive and musical.

Still within this conception of total art, Wassily Kandinsky designed in 1928 the Pictures at an Exhibition, an abstract staging of Mussorgsky’s piano suite. Kandinsky created sets, lighting, and mobile geometric scenic movements (colored forms: light green, white, crimson, black, ochre) that translated each of Viktor Hartmann’s pictures into dynamic abstraction, synchronized with the music. Color, light, and sound merge, putting into practice the theories from On the Spiritual in Art adapted to pure geometry.

The closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 forced him into definitive exile in Paris, where his pictorial language finally opened up to greater organic fluidity.

Parisian Period (1933–1944)

The rise of Nazism then drove him into exile. The Parisian Period (1933–1944) sees the appearance of organic biomorphic forms, fluid and surrealist. Did his meeting with Miró in 1934 contribute to this stylistic evolution?

Darker colors, floating cosmic forms now characterize his pictorial world, less constrained by geometric rigidity.

Kandinsky: further materials

(English adaptation of this section kindly provided by Grok. Pour la version originale en français, rendez-vous ici).

The exhibition press kit (in English) is available here: Press release – Kandinsky. The Music of Colors. It includes the musical playlist, scenographic details, reproductions, and room-by-room texts—perfect for deepening your understanding of the show.

For a solid educational overview, the Centre Pompidou’s 2009 dossier on Kandinsky has an English version here: Vassily Kandinsky – Monographie (English). It features excerpts from Kandinsky’s writings (including Concerning the Spiritual in Art), precise biographical details, illustrations, and collection history - highly recommended for its clarity and depth.

Key English-language resources include:

• The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation – Extensive Kandinsky holdings with excellent online materials: biography, key artworks (including many Compositions), teaching resources, and exhibition history. Very useful for visual analysis and context on his abstract evolution: Vasily Kandinsky and Teaching Materials: Kandinsky.

• Tate (UK) – Concise biography, high-quality images of major works (e.g., Swinging, Cossacks), and interpretive articles: Wassily Kandinsky 1866–1944. Great for quick overviews and connections to British collections.

• The Art Story – Well-organized biography, influences, key ideas, and useful videos/articles on his life and abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky Paintings, Bio, Ideas. Accessible and synthetic.

• WassilyKandinsky.net – A comprehensive site with over 600 artworks (including Compositions, Improvisations, Impressions), biography, rare photos, quotes, and links to his books: Wassily Kandinsky — 614 artworks, biography, books, quotes, articles. Excellent for browsing visuals and primary sources.

For his theoretical writings in English:

• Concerning the Spiritual in Art (full English translation available online or in print editions, e.g., via Guggenheim or Internet Archive).

• Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art (edited by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo) – collects all his published texts on art.

Finally, for audiovisual content in English, search YouTube for high-quality shorts like “Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art” (Aeon Videos / Listening In channel) or “What’s the Sound of Colour? Kandinsky and Music” – they explore his synesthesia and musical influences with visuals and narration.

Conclusions

Two remarkable artists, but so different, in this first article of 2026. One, John Singer Sargent, a virtuoso of the brush from his earliest youth, immersed very early in the international art scene, undisputed master of light and society portraiture. The other, Wassily Kandinsky, an outstanding theorist and innovator, who came to painting late in life, and who sought to name and theorize the artistic experience as a vehicle for the deepest aspirations of the soul. Both, in their own way, knew how to master the networks and means of communication of their time to make their vision shine.

So here are two beautiful exhibitions not to be missed:

• The one dedicated to John Singer Sargent at the Musée d’Orsay (ended in January 2026) offers much more than a retrospective: once in this magnificent setting, you have access to all modern and some contemporary art in the museum.

• The one dedicated to Kandinsky at the Philharmonie de Paris (until February 2026) goes far beyond a painting exhibition: it is a true immersion in total art according to Kandinsky, where color, music, and spirit merge. And if it “took you for a walk in an unknown world,” then the artist has fully succeeded in his bet.

In the end, the simple prism of color chosen for this article is only a modest entry point. Hoping that it inspires you to cross Paris this January, to dive into these two major figures in art history, and perhaps to come back and explore other facets of their work.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Perplexity AI for extensive research help and reliable Kandinsky references, and to Grok for translation assistance. All final content and interpretations are my own.

New Year Wishes

by Jeannette Hanenburg, ICA-Belgium President

Dear members and friends of ICA Belgium,

At the beginning of this new year, we would like to offer you our sincere wishes. We live in turbulent times. Uncertainties are mounting, from geopolitical tensions to social polarisation. That is precisely why it is important that we continue to find common ground in what unites us: respect, openness, and tolerance.

In 2025 we organised some wonderful Meet & Greets and inspiring Colour Talks, which you can find on our website and YouTube channel, along with many more from the past few years.

We want to thank you for your commitment, expertise, and passion. Thanks to you, ICA Belgium remains a place where knowledge, creativity, and science meet.

Warm wishes

We wish you a colourful, warm, and inspiring 2026, a year in which we continue to see, support, and appreciate one another.

And finally, I would like to say a few words about our online Colour Talks. We’re truly pleased to see how many of you join us time and again. We connect with each other through our shared passion for developments in colour, even when we’re all behind our own screens. We hope you’ll continue to join us in the new year, because your presence makes these sessions so valuable.

Our decision to move our website to Substack also feels like a real step forward. The platform allows us to communicate with you in a much more direct and welcoming way, and we hope you will join or support ICA Belgium there.

What’s in it for you?

All paid subscribers (monthly and yearly) and ICA-Belgium members get access to:

• Colour Chat - a private Chat Group on Substack, where you can meet other colour professionals, share your work, explore opportunities for collaboration and contribute to a dynamic colour platform.

• Colour Book Club

Yearly paid subscribers, sponsors and ICA-Belgium members are entitled to additional benefits:

• Discounts for our events and workshops

• Your colour related news published in our newsletter

• Opportunity to be featured in an article or interview about your colour related work in our newsletter

* on how to become a member or a paid subscriber, see here.

Introducing the ICA-Belgium Colour Book Club

Discovering inspiring books. Reading, sharing, and exploring the world of books on colour together and sharing insights. Are you in? Join us at our new Colour Book Club, online.

More about it in the next newsletter.

We look forward to building a community of colour lovers with you.

May your New Year be peaceful, happy, healthy, and full of colour!

Save the Date

8 February 2026

Online: Sunday morning Colour Talk with Juan Serra Lluch

More information and registration are coming soon.

22 March 2026

Online: Sunday morning Colour Talk: Celebrating International Colour Day

More information and registration are coming soon.

27-28 June, 2026

Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop, Germany: Colour Workshop: Interaction of Colour in Space - with Juan Serra Lluch and Maria Zurbuchen-Henz

In collaboration with Deutsches Farbenzentrum and Josef Albers Museum Quadrat. More information and registration are coming soon.

Places are limited to 25. Register on the waiting list to be among the first to be notified when registration opens.

Call for Members’ Activity Reports

The submission deadline is 24 January 2026.

Every year the AIC (Association International de la Couleur) publishes an Annual Review of activities by its international members. At ICA-Belgium, we like to celebrate the achievements of our members, however small or large and include them in our report. We would like to hear about your colour-related work in 2025 as well as your plans for 2026. These may be events, publications, research, projects, or completed work... The reports will be published in the AIC Annual Review (see the Annual Review 2024) as well as in the ICA-Belgium Annual Activity Report on our website and shared through our social media.

Please send your reports to ica@ica-belgium.org (with the message title Report 2025_Your Name). The maximum word count is 200, the text should be in English, and a few quality photos can also be attached (300 dpi, with a short caption description; please send as individual files, not embedded in a document).

Colour Experience Research Group of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, is conducting a scientific study, exploring how people perceive colours and what they believe about the impact of colour on emotions.

You can access the survey in English, German, French, and Spanish.

Colour Study Flyer

4.25MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Colour Survey by the Colour Experience Research Group, University of Lausanne

Download

Call for Abstracts

Abstract submission deadline: 28 February 2026

The sixth Progress in Colour Studies (PICS 2026) conference will be held in Wrocław, Poland, on 10–12 September 2026. The conference will be organized jointly by the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław and the University of Wrocław.

The aim of the PICS 2026 conference is to provide a forum for discussing studies on colour conducted by researchers representing different disciplines: linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, psychology, history, political science, art history, architecture studies, physics, chemistry and biology.

A special focus of the conference is on how colour is perceived and treated by artists and art theorists.

For more information see: https://phc.uni.wroc.pl/PICS2026/

Colour Exhibitions on our radar

Magritte. La ligne de vie

Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, on view until February 22, 2026

Nature grants us the dreamlike state that gives our body and mind the freedom they so urgently need.

- René Magritte, during his lecture La ligne de vie

In 1938, René Magritte gave an exceptional lecture at the KMSKA, sharing his vision of reality. Under the title La ligne de vie, he spoke about the origins of his art, his fascination with the mysterious within the everyday, and the development of Belgian Surrealism. It became the most important lecture he ever gave about his own work.

The exhibition Magritte. La ligne de vie, brings this historic moment back to life. You are invited to walk through Magritte’s lecture: his words, his ideas, and the paintings he discussed at the time.

From his early experiments to iconic works full of visual riddles and wordplay, yes, Ceci n’est pas une pipe is part of the journey.

Magritte reveals why trees, windows, and other seemingly ordinary motifs play such a central role in his oeuvre. At the same time, the exhibition highlights how his appearance in Antwerp became a turning point for the local Surrealist scene. Artists such as Marcel Mariën and Léo Dohmen found in Magritte a guide for a new, distinctive Flemish variant of Surrealism: sober, sharp, and deeply mysterious.

A unique opportunity to encounter Magritte not only as an artist, but also as a thinker.

More information at https://kmska.be/en/magritte-la-ligne-de-vie

Bridget Riley Point de départ

Musée d’Orsay, Paris, on view until January 25th, 2026

The exhibition Bridget Riley: point de départ explores how Bridget Riley’s study of Georges Seurat’s work served as a defining moment in the development of her artistic process. Acting both as a beginning and as a deviation, the starting point refers to the moment in 1959, when Riley copied Seurat’s Bridge at Courbevoie from a reproduction in a book. This act taught her how to place colours next to each other to create vibration in her work through optical effects, a principle that has continued to inform her practice right up to the present day.

Recognised as one of the major artists of our time, often associated with the op art movement, this recontextualisation of her work through the prism of the tribute paid to Seurat, presents her primarily as a vibrant Post-Impressionist painter of our age.

More information: https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/bridget-riley-point-de-depart

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