Lumina: The Art of Color and Light

In Izmir, the Lucien Arkas Art Center is showing Lumina: The Art of Color and Light, a group exhibition of 83 works from the collection of the Centre Pompidou. It runs from 26 September 2026 to 14 February 2027. Curated by Anna Hiddleston and Noémie Fillon, it gathers paintings, photographs and other works made between the start of the twentieth century and the 1970s. Together they trace how artists treated colour and light, first as a way to describe the world and later as subjects in their own right.

The show is arranged in seven sections. It begins with the Fauves, among them Georges Braque and Maurice de Vlaminck, and their bright response to Mediterranean light. A section on electric light follows, with Natalia Goncharova's La lampe électrique of 1913 and Luigi Russolo's Automobile in corsa. Fernand Léger, František Kupka and Vassily Kandinsky represent the search for links between colour and music, while a section in black and white includes scientific photographs by Berenice Abbott.

Illuminating Nature turns to daylight and landscape. Here Joan Mitchell's large painting La Grande Vallée, inspired by Monet, is set against the bright geometric landscape work of Etel Adnan and Shirley Jaffe. Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925. The last two sections cover Color Field painting, with its broad flat areas of saturated hue, and Op Art, in which optical effects make the act of looking unstable. The selection also includes Gerhard Richter's 1024 Farben (350-3), a lacquer painting of 1973 measuring 254 by 478 centimetres. Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Jesús Rafael Soto, Kenneth Noland, Yaacov Agam and Richard-Paul Lohse are also on the list of artists.

The exhibition is organised by the Centre Pompidou and Arkas Art and is the first major show of a five-year partnership between the two, running from 2026 to 2031. The Lucien Arkas Art Center, the seventh venue of Arkas Art, was opened in 2026. Over the five years it is due to host ten shows drawn from the Pompidou's holdings, two a year across five themed seasons. The first season, devoted to colour and light, also takes in film, music and performance.