'You Have to See It. The Autonomy of Colour in Abstract Art' featuring Anish Kapoor at Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain

22 January 2025

From 28 February – 8 June 2025, It Must Be Seen. The Autonomy of Colour in Abstract Art featuring Anish Kapoor will open at Fundación Juan March. Renowned for sculptures that are adventures in form and engage public space, Anish Kapoor’s work situates our inner world into the world around us, its inversions and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of being and non-being, that disrupt our quotidian reality.

It Must Be Seen. The Autonomy of Colour in Abstract Art will present the work of a large number of 20th and 21st century artists for whom colour was an essential and structuring principle. The exhibition will focus on early abstraction experiments and the use of flat colour areas, which are not modulated by gesture. In addition to painting, sculpture and works on paper, it will include film and video, installations and interventions, textiles, ceramics, photographs, books and documents.

Colour is an essential quality of the visual arts, from the earliest cave paintings to the latest contemporary experiments in digital media. For many artists it has constituted a powerful force and the center of their practice, and for philosophers and thinkers it has provided abundant material for thought, debate and essay. The exhibition will also have a space dedicated to the precursors of colour autonomy, with publications by theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as major pieces that demonstrate the sources of colour in different civilizations, its relationship with optics and the physics of light, natural and synthetic pigments and dyes, and their use throughout the history of art.

Find out more via Fundación Juan March.

Shown here: Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 1996, Pigment, sand, fibreglass, 134 x 134 x 85 cm, 52 3/4 x 52 3/4 x 33 1/2 in, © Anish Kapoor, Courtesy Lisson Gallery