Upcoming Exhibition

Notes on Colour

Tuesday 23 June – Saturday 12 September 2026

But what is colour? A kind of bliss. - Roland Barthes, 1979

There is an ineffable, beyond-language quality to colour that cannot be easily pinned down. Notes on Colour is an exhibition which brings together the work of three contemporary artists, Vicken Parsons, Jeff McMillan and David Batchelor, for whom colour has been an abiding preoccupation over many years. These three artists make works which employ different materials, take different forms and address different questions, yet are linked by a deep and prolonged interest in the complexity, unpredictability, and sheer sensuous pleasures of colour. Each artist’s work rests on the edges of abstraction, without being fully abstract: a place where colour has space to breathe, without being entirely detached from the material world.

Colour is stronger than language. - Louise Bourgeois, 1992

Vicken Parsons makes small, intimate paintings on plywood panels using thin layers of oil paint. Each painting is an exploration of space, the specific qualities of which are evoked almost entirely through subtle colour relationships. Often her paintings contain elements that suggest a kind of provisional architecture or landscape. In some recent paintings, these elements have receded, and colour itself has expanded into a pulsing field of light that seems to emit from the confines of the small panels. The origin of each painting might be a particular spatial experience, but the results are often luminous, ethereal, and richly suggestive.

Colour is a sign of the existence of life. - Etel Adnan, 1986

^{Vicken Parsons Untitled, VP 2510 2025 Oil on plywood panel 24 x 28cm}

Since the early 1990s, David Batchelor has been concerned with the experience of colour within the modern urban environment and with historical conceptions of colour within Western culture. His recent collages of torn paper, and sculptures of spray-painted cast concrete blocks are exercises in colour and balance which often feel precariously contingent and vividly immediate. While his works refer to the energy, lights, forms, spaces and colours of the built environment, they also allude to children’s play with building blocks.

Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. - Oscar Wilde

^{David Batchelor Concreto-Concreto 19 2025 Concrete, spray paint  H730 x W135 x D62mm}

Jeff McMillan’s work approaches painting through materiality and process, often in dialogue with the found object. In this recent body of work, McMillan has dipped stretched canvases of antique linen into a bath of thinned, richly pigmented oil paint, creating jewel-hued monochrome paintings. These flat oil-painted surfaces were then hung outside and exposed to the elements for a number of years in London or his native Texas. The results are entropic paintings whose distressed and desaturated surfaces are indexical reminders of what has been lost: frayed and faded monochromes. But in their impurities, erasures and scars, there is character and fragile beauty.

^{Jeff McMillan  Untitled (Sap Green H-214)  Oil on linen 103 x 82 cm}

Curated by Annushka Shani.

Header image: Jeff McMillan Untitled (Sap Green H-214) Oil on linen 103 x 82 cm