Colour in Contemporary Art by Harald Arnkil
Fri, Apr 17
|Virtual Event
How do contemporary artists use colours, and how do they regard colour theories? Harald Arnkil examines the interrelation of scientific, philosophical and and artistic theories of colour and their significance for contemporary art.
Time & Location
Apr 17, 2026, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT
Virtual Event
About the event
Title: Colour in Contemporary Art
Captions (L to R): 1. Katharina Grosse, Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets Between Us (2021). Exhibition view at Helsinki Art Museum HAM, 2021. Photo: Harald Arnkil. 2. Charline von Heyl, The Garden of Cyrus (2021). Acrylic and oil on linen, 208 x 188 cm. Photo: Harald Arnkil. 3. Olafur Eliasson, Your Rainbow Panorama (2011). Permanent installation, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark. Photo: Wikimedia commons/Gordon Leggett
How do contemporary artists use colours, and how do they regard colour theories? From the 1960s onwards artists have used colours in ever more varied material, spatial and temporal contexts; the globalisation of the art market, the Internet and the availability of cheap air travel have provided artists with access to an exponentially growing array of ideas, means and cultures of colour. At the same time, the formalistic axioms of “artistic colour theory” have lost track of these changes and fail…