Colour News June 2026
Colour related news and events
Greetings from the boiling hot Belgium! In the June edition of ICA-Belgium Colour News, we invite you to read an essay by Maja Kaurin from the Collection of Essays dedicated to Josef Albers, as we prepare for this weekend’s workshop Colour in Space.
Explore the work of Gerhard Richter through the masterful pen of Vinciane Lacroix, as we welcome her to the ICA-Belgium Board!
-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 Maja Kaurin
In early 2023, I had the opportunity to visit the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop, Germany, and take part in a 2-day workshop with a special focus on the pedagogy of Josef Albers. A tour of the temporary exhibition Josef Albers: Huldigung an das Quadrat (Homage to the square) was part of the workshop.
While exploring the rooms of a beautiful, soft-lit museum building, catching glimpses of the sleepy Stadtgarten Park through the large windows, I slowly passed through the white rooms full of Albers’s paintings. There was only an hour of time, and, of course, it was not enough to take it all in. I stood in front of the paintings, admiring the depth of colour on some and the lightness and low opacity on others, the interaction of a specific colour of a square within a colour of another square, creating a sort of halo effect, bringing another colour to life that is not there, and yet we see it.
So many combinations, so many possibilities. It is no wonder that Albers created more than two thousand works within his Homage to the square series and often expressed that a million years would not be enough to explore all the possible combinations and discover all that is to learn about colour. I couldn’t agree more.
His Homage to the Square oeuvre could easily be called Homage to Colour since it doesn’t have as much to do with the square as it has all to do with colour. Colour is present fully with its raw materiality that transcends boundaries, never to be confined between the lines, but instead existing in a constant, often mysterious interplay with its neighbour, thus creating new fields and spaces of colour, sometimes pulling you in, sometimes keeping you out, even letting light emerge from the canvas.
There is something deeply meditative and poetic in the squares of Josef Albers and it is that fragile state of being in which colour dwells, a sort of transcendence, that attracts me in his work and pushes me to explore, to look, to understand.
Josef Albers likened the behaviour of colours to the dynamics of human behaviour. We behave differently in a group than when we are alone, when among friends and family or among strangers. It is that dynamics in the interaction of colour that provides so many possibilities for shaping space with colour.
“When you really understand that each colour is changed by a changed environment, you eventually find that you have learned about life as well as about colour.”
-Josef Albers (from Josef Albers: The American Years, Washington 1965, p. 28).
I believe the exploration of colour is a life-time quest and it would take several lifetimes to grasp it all, to experiment, explore and create all that can be done.
This weekend I will be returning to the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop for the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space (June 27-28, 2026).
The idea of this workshop was born during that first visit to the Museum in 2023. It has been in preparation for more than 2 years, and it is a true team effort, spanning continents. Organised by two colour associations (of Belgium and of Germany), with the support of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation from the US and the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Germany, with the lecturers from Spain, Switzerland, and Germany, it is truly international. Colour unites.
It has been a pleasure to organise this workshop, and I am looking forward to making new connections, new insights and new colourful memories this weekend.
The workshop registration has closed, but if anyone would still like to jump in and join at the last minute, send us a message; we still have one place left. And there is air-con at the museum :)
Read the full Essay here.
- Maja Kaurin is Croatian-Hungarian architect and environmental colour designer and educator. She serves as a vice-president of Interdisciplinary Colour Association Belgium (ICA-Belgium). She writes The Colour Spotter Chronicles and sometimes calls herself a walking artist.
Parisian Colours II: Richter
By Vinciane Lacroix
This fourth article in the ICA-commissioned series explores the major Gerhard Richter retrospective held at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (October 17, 2025 – March 2, 2026). Spanning nearly 270 works from 1962 to 2024, the exhibition offered a remarkable chronological journey through the artist’s multifaceted career, set within Frank Gehry’s iconic architecture.
From early photo-paintings and blurred grey works to radical colour charts, systematic abstractions, and explorations of chance, reflection, and memory, Richter consistently defies categorization while maintaining a instantly recognizable signature. The retrospective highlighted his technical mastery, his oscillation between neutrality and emotional depth, and his lifelong interrogation of colour — from the pursuit of indifference through grey monochromes to explosive chromatic experiments.
Particularly striking are his inversions of photographic codes, his use of constraint and randomness, and his reflections on reality through mirrors and glass. Even after announcing his retirement from painting, Richter continues to surprise and inspire with ongoing exhibitions worldwide.
A thoughtful and richly illustrated reflection on one of the most important artistic voices of our time.
Members News
Welcoming Vinciane Lacroix to the Board of ICA-Belgium
We are growing!
We are happy to announce that Vinciane Lacroix is joining the Board of ICA-Belgium.
Vinciane has been our long time supporter and active member. Her articles exploring the colour in the art, as one of the ICA-Belgium Colour News editors, are a very valuable contribution.
Vinciane is a multidisciplinary artist, blogger, and former researcher in image processing and computer vision. Situated between art and science, her practice investigates colour as both material and concept, through artistic production, writing, and digital experimentation. She writes about colour in English on Color Time and in French on vincianelacroix.net, where she shares her ongoing fascination with colour, visual perception, and artistic processes. Through Chromagenesis, she developed a project that recomposes the palettes of masterpieces in order to release them from their original forms and approach the colour essence of the source image. She gives talks on colour, from a personal perspective at the crossroads of art and science, as well as on her artistic practice, Chromagenesis, for a variety of audiences. You can find more about her at https://vincianelacroix.net/portfolio/
Welcome, Vinciane!
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