Anish Kapoor, in his practice, has often returned to the question of the void: not emptiness as lack, but as a presence that pulls perception inward. In Luna (2016), a gouache on paper, the work foregrounds the physical act of drawing—gesture and layering remain visible, refusing the smooth closure of an image. Colour here behaves as a zone of concentration: surface and depth are continuously negotiated, as if the pigment were not a coating but a space. The work’s power lies in its refusal to resolve: it stages interiority as a perceptual task rather than a symbol. 

Alejandro Campins is known for a slow, research-based process in which places are first recorded—through photography or video—then metabolised through sketches and synthesis over months. His landscapes are often emptied of human presence, and that absence produces a strange transfer of identity onto architecture itself: structures become characters, memory becomes atmosphere. In Espacio Carmín, crimson is not merely mood; it is a spatial container. 

Hans Op de Beeck produces  large-scale installations, sculpture, film, photography, and text, Op de Beeck consistently constructs what might be called visual fiction: scenes that hover between recognition and abstraction, offering a “moment of wonder and silence” while remaining haunted by questions of meaning and mortality. Lakescape (2025) evokes a landscape without specifying one; its controlled modelling and surface finishing unify the image, stripping it of descriptive detail so that the work becomes less depiction than perceptual condition. 

Ai Weiwei’s Pillar (2006) brings another kind of density: not psychological but material and historical. Known internationally for a practice that moves between sculpture, architecture, photography, film, and political activism, Ai Weiwei often mobilises traditional forms at altered scale to test how authority is constructed— culturally and physically. Pillar enlarges the shapes of Chinese vessels drawn from dynastic histories into monumental porcelain. The work’s restraint—its refusal of ornament—intensifies its mass, while the technical risk embedded in its making (large-scale firing with uncertainty and failure) becomes an invisible pressure inside the object.

Daniel Buren’s practice has, since the mid-1960s, rigorously questioned the economy of painting—how background and form, support and colour, produce meaning — and, crucially, how the work’s conditions of display are never neutral. His works are often conceived as travail situé: not autonomous images but propositions activated by the site. In Couleurs et Ombres portées N°13 (2006–2025), colour is displaced into space through projection and shadow. Transparent surfaces and opaque bands produce coloured shadows that extend beyond the object, making the surrounding architecture part of the work’s structure. The result is not an image but a variable configuration: colour becomes a physical phenomenon whose meaning depends on light, movement, and time. The viewer does not face the work; they enter its optics. 

Julio Le Parc’s contribution insists even more explicitly that perception is the medium. A major historical figure in kinetic and contemporary art, and co-founder of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), Le Parc developed a practice rooted in rigorous organising principles—systems of colour scales, repeated protocols, serial variation—precisely in order to shift attention away from expressive gesture and toward perceptual instability. Série 13 n°13-5 (1970) operates as one variation within a defined visual program: repetition and difference generate vibration, rhythm, and retinal uncertainty.

Nedko Solakov introduces another temporal structure: narrative as a form of chromatic drift. Known for combining traditional technique with conceptual practices, Solakov is fundamentally a storyteller—his work often hinges on short narratives, semantic double-entendres, aphorisms, and ironic turns. In Lost in a World Made Up by Another Person (2023), watercolour establishes unstable atmospheres while ink figures recur across different planes. The series format matters: repetition without resolution. 

Pascale Marthine Tayou’s practice is defined by variability—refusing allegiance to a single medium—and by an insistence on displacement and circulation: materials and symbols move, change meaning, arrive elsewhere. Even the artist’s name carries this logic, complicated by the addition of an “e” to feminise it and ironise authorship. In Chalk E (2008), Tayou transforms a fragile material associated with education and impermanence into a dense, rhythmic surface. Chalk is arranged side by side into a structured chromatic field, where repetition produces stability—but only temporarily. The work’s vulnerability remains present: colour here is always one touch away from erosion. Tayou’s chalk surfaces also recall textile logics—pattern as memory, repetition as cultural carrier—without fixing those references into a single origin. 

Nicola Durvasula’s small sculptural clusters deepen this register through found materials and quiet metaphysical inquiry. Durvasula’s practice—shaped by decades of engagement with South Asian culture and philosophy, and sustained through an ongoing notebook-based enquiry—juxtaposes references from Mughal miniatures and temple sculpture with a Western aesthetic vocabulary. Her sculptural works point to a legacy of objets trouvés: objects of the ordinary that can refer to biography, happenstance, metaphysics, and the beauty of the everyday. In works such as Untitled (Dry Landscape) (2023–25), serial grouping and iterative making form a structural logic: fragments recur and recombine, building meaning through accumulation rather than hierarchy.

Astha Butail introduces a different kind of slowness—one grounded in study, transmission, and devotion to the labour of repetition. In Ongoing Conversation with the Sky 9 (2024), thread, fabric, and acrylic construct colour through return: stitching, layering, re-stitching. The work does not deliver colour as immediate visual impact; it allows colour to emerge as a durational consequence. It asks the viewer to adapt their tempo—to meet the work at the speed of attention rather than consumption.

Anita Dube’s practice sits at the intersection of intellectual rigour and material intensity. Dube’s work has been widely exhibited internationally and across India, and is consistently attentive to how bodies—especially vulnerable bodies—are shaped by power, intimacy, rupture, and resistance. In Void–Coitus (2008), colour and texture function as charged signals. The work’s stakes are not resolved into a single reading; instead it holds tension—between desire and injury, concealment and exposure. 

Hanif Kureshi’s work situates colour in the public realm as inscription and voice. Celebrated for typography and for reviving India’s vernacular scripts, he spearheaded the Handpainted Type Project and co-founded initiatives that shaped the street-art movement in India, bringing design, activism, and public space into direct relation. Kureshi Series – XXIV (2024), executed in aerosol, carries this lineage into the exhibition: colour arrives with speed and risk, negotiated by gravity, dispersion, and surface resistance. The mark is both image and event, inseparable from the temporality of the city—its urgency, its disappearance, its need to be read quickly yet remembered slowly. 

Thukral & Tagra, the New Delhi–based duo, expand inscription into the language of contemporary life—consumerism, aspiration, spectacle—often using humour and participatory formats to make critique legible without flattening it. In Mimesis C (2022), forty painted units disperse colour across a serial structure. No single element dominates; meaning arises through relation, comparison, accumulation. This serial logic resonates with post-war strategies that rejected the singular masterpiece in favour of modules and systems, but it also feels pointedly contemporary: perception here is not private contemplation alone, but a collective negotiation—how we look together, how we assemble meaning across fragments. 

Annotations on Colour invites you to a realm that proposes an altered idea of meaning making. Here, colour persists beyond the moment of encounter, lingering as after-image and memory, continuing to act long after the audience has dispersed—folding itself back into the body, the city, and the light that first made it visible.