We acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the Country on which the Art Gallery of New South Wales stands.

This Living Being That Is Colour

Looping bands of orange, yellow and white on a red and purple background

Ildiko Kovacs In my heart 2015, Art Gallery of New South Wales © Ildiko Kovacs

Works by contemporary artists who share a belief in the power of colour and of abstraction

This Living Being That Is Colour

28 October 2023 – 4 February 2024

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Naala Nura, our south building

Ground level, Kaldor Hall

Free

🛈 Find out what you need to know before visiting

This display of works from the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection is presented in conjunction with the major exhibition Kandinsky (4 November 2023 – 10 March 2024).

‘This living being that is colour’ is a quote from Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), one of the great innovators of European abstraction.

For Kandinsky, whose art reshaped the trajectory of 20th-century painting, colour was the channel for the direct expression of the spirit; beyond language, beyond conscious comprehension. ‘Colour directly influences the soul’, he wrote. ‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.’

Kandinsky’s love of colours hinged on their always being ‘ready to submit into new combinations, to mix with each other, creating unending successions of new worlds’. In this display, we find a multitude of new worlds in works by artists who share with Kandinsky a belief that, ‘the harmonies of colour and form … are the joy of this world’.