Sign 16 (2023), a ceramic work by Lubna Chowdhary, is featured in It Must Be Seen. The Autonomy of Colour in Abstract Art, an exhibition curated by Manuel Fontán del Junco (Director of Museums and Exhibitions) and María Zozaya Álvarez (Head of Exhibition Projects) at the Juan March Foundation, with the collaboration of David Batchelor and Paul Smith. The exhibition runs from February 28 to June 8, 2025.
Colour does not exist, but the world is unimaginable without it. As a phenomenon—in every sense—it has been present in thought and in the arts from the first cave paintings to contemporary digital experiments. For many artists, it has constituted the centre of their practice, and for philosophers and scientists it has provided abundant material for reflection and debate.
In artistic creation the importance of colour has been regularly debated and rejected, but the appearance of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth century freed it from the dictates of representation and the primacy of line. For the first time, colour could constitute its own presence in the work, not subject to narrative models nor other elements of graphic value.
It Must Be Seen. The Autonomy of Colour in Abstract Art presents the work of a wide number of artists from the XX and XXI centuries for whom colour is an essential and structuring principle. The exhibition begins with the first experiments of abstraction and centres on the use of planar colour, unmodulated by gesture. In addition to painting, sculpture and works on paper, it includes textiles, ceramics, photography, installations, film, video and artists’ books.
Alongside these works the exhibition boasts two unique spaces. The first showcases the diagrams and chromatic circles published to illustrate artistic and scientific theories of colour developed in the course of the XVIII and XIX centuries. It also explores the relationship between colour, optics and the physics of light, the elements that it comes from and the media through which it is expressed, as seen throughout history in the pigments, the natural and synthetic dyes and in the polychromy in art. Not forgetting the closely related philosophical, ideological and cultural implications of colour. The second space, Coloramas, presents an expansive experience intended to enhance the visual survey provided by the exhibition.
