Colour News January 2026
Colour related news and events
Welcome to another edition of ICA-Belgium Colour News, where we bring you colour related news from Belgium and around the world.
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.
As a colour association, we know better than anyone that diversity is not a threat but a strength. Colours don’t clash; they influence, reinforce, and enrich one another. Let that also be our attitude in 2026: curious about each other, gentle in our judgments, and willing to build bridges.
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: 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.
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
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.
