Colour, Material, Texture

From the Collections

Display of works from the Estrine Museum collections.

14 February — 20 December 2026

In the history of painting, colour occupies a pre-eminent place. Initially imitative of reality, it later emancipates itself from it, as exemplified by the work of the artist Vincent van Gogh, who paved the way for a new use of colour, one that is more subjective and more attuned to sensation. Within the European avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, colour remains at the heart of artistic experimentation: Albert Gleizes combines it in flat planes with the fragmentation of perspective; Robert and Sonia Delaunay perceive in this deconstruction of form the eruption of light, and thus of colour itself. A few years later, artists of the École de Paris, such as André Marchand and Édouard Pignon, take a different direction, employing saturated colour palettes within figurative compositions. In the second half of the twentieth century, Léon Zack repudiates past traditions, and his research leads him to seek the hidden truth that lies beyond colour. Within the Supports/Surfaces movement, Vincent Bioulès turns towards abstraction and attempts to restore colour to its independent reality. Gérard Fromanger, for his part, reinvents colour through the reworking of processes such as photography and printing, by isolating colours. Finally, in the work of Denis Laget, colour emerges from a muddy, dense material, in the full force of its tones. Through a chronological hanging of its collections, the Estrine Museum invites visitors to discover the full range of artistic investigations into colour and its materiality.