Jorrit Tornquist. Colour is space in itself

Starting from January 29th 2026, ABC-ARTE presents at its Genoa venue the exhibition Colour is space in itself by Jorrit Tornquist, curated by Flaminio Gualdoni and organized in collaboration with the Jorrit Tornquist Archive.

The exhibition represents the first such extensive and significant show dedicated to the artist in a private Italian gallery, and inaugurates an important process of critical and historical reinterpretation of his work, essential for understanding the complexity of European art from the 1960s onward.

Jorrit Tornquist (Graz, March 26, 1938 – Cisano Bergamasco, May 17, 2023) was a singular figure, and one still to be fully explored, within the landscape of late twentieth-century art. His work has often been noted for its extreme methodological rigor, yet the profound biological and natural dimension that always animated it has been less frequently recognized: a vital tension that links his research to the organic world and to the sensory experience of colour as living matter.

The exhibition is conceived as the beginning of a deep and comprehensive reconsideration of the artist’s entire oeuvre, presenting a selection of crucial works that trace a coherent and strikingly contemporary path.

From the early Colonna infinita (1966), where he realized the intuition that colour is in itself space and which also opens onto his fundamental experience in the architectural field, to the polyptych Petals (2002), in which the modulation of minimal tonal variations provokes an immersive and disorienting experience for the viewer, the exhibition conveys the full depth of Tornquist’s vision.

For Tornquist, colour is the problematic and vital substance of our seeing, not a mere expressive tool: it is the very matter of vision itself. His inquiry is never a rhetorical investigation of perception, but a continuous exercise in awareness, an invitation to reconnect our gaze with the phenomenal reality that surrounds us.... read the rest of the article»