For Jorrit Tornquist, color is not a means but a condition: living space, sensitive matter, the primary experience of seeing.
ABC-ARTE presents at its historic Genoese venue the exhibition Jorrit Tornquist. Color Is Space in Itself, curated by Flaminio Gualdoni and realized in collaboration with the Jorrit Tornquist Archive.
The exhibition represents the first such extensive and significant presentation of the artist in an Italian private gallery, and inaugurates an important process of critical and historical reappraisal 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—one that in many respects still calls for deeper investigation—within the landscape of late twentieth-century art. While his work has often been noted for its extreme methodological rigor, the profound biological and natural implication that always animated his research has been less frequently acknowledged: a vital tension that connects his practice to the organic world and to the sensory experience of color as living matter.
The exhibition at ABC-ARTE is conceived as the beginning of a profound and comprehensive reconsideration of the artist’s entire oeuvre, presenting a selection of crucial works that trace a coherent and surprisingly timely trajectory.
From the early Infinite Column (1966), in which the intuition is already at work that would later be articulated in his 1974 statement “Color is space in itself”—an intuition that also opens onto his fundamental engagement with architecture—to the polyptych Petals (2002), where the ability to modulate minimal tonal shifts generates an immersive and disorienting experience for the viewer, the exhibition unfolds the depth of Tornquist’s vision.
For Tornquist, color is the problematic and vital substance of our act of seeing, rather than a mere expressive tool: it is the very matter of vision itself.
His is never a rhetorical investigation of perception, but rather a continuous exercise in awareness, an invitation to reconnect our gaze with the phenomenal reality that surrounds us.
Within this perspective also fall the celebrated Didactic Boxes, presented at the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986 and here proposed once again. Through the apparatus typical of didactic display, Tornquist prompted viewers to become aware that they were undergoing an aesthetic experience that extends far beyond simple visual observation, transforming it into living knowledge.
A bilingual publication, published by ABC-ARTE Edizioni, will accompany the exhibition, featuring essays by Flaminio Gualdoni and a rich documentary apparatus curated by the Jorrit Tornquist Archive, aimed at further exploring the artist’s reflection on color as space and as the matter of seeing.
The exhibition will be on view from January 29 to April 14, 2026 at ABC-ARTE, Via XX Settembre 11A, Genoa.
The opening reception will take place on Thursday, January 29 at 6:30 pm.