Colour is an intrinsic characteristic of everything around us. Colour is something to which we innately respond. It can delight or distress, attract or repel, soothe us or shock us.
Colour also has a history. Aristotle argued that the gods sent us colours in the form of celestial rays. Newton discovered that colour results from the reflection and absorption of light. In today's digitally dominated world, colours increasingly reach us through screens. Now colour is no longer reflective, but radiant.
Broken White — a 10-room exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven curated by Bas van Tol, Jurgen Bey, Thomas Widdershoven and Mathieu Meijers — explores the role and effect of colour in its many manifestations. Devised in response to the museum's floor plan of a succession of rooms, the exhibition comprises ten spaces, each of which is modelled on an archetypal space such as a church, laboratory, museum or studio. In each, one particular quality of colour is highlighted through a selection of art and design.
The exhibition rooms form two complementary routes, one taking us through the urban and social world, the other through the rural and natural world. The routes converge in the 'Salon of the Future', where colour becomes dynamic, changing in response to the environment.
The final room features work by artist Mathieu Meijers who, as a teacher at the Design Academy Eindhoven, had developed a concept for redefining our relationship to colour. This space at the heart of the exhibition is called, appropriately, 'The Colour Incubator'.