Hommage to Josef Albers #03
Essays on Albers by the organisers of the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space
By Lina Schmidt
“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.