Image: University Museum of Navarra, Madrid
The University Museum of Navarra will open ‘En vivo y en directo. Color, percepción y experiencia’ on 16 September, bringing together artworks and experimental modules to investigate colour as an interactive and dynamic phenomenon. The exhibition will remain on view through 7 February 2027 in the museum’s lower-level galleries in Pamplona, Spain.
Curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, the exhibition’s artistic curator, and Nathaniel Barret, its academic curator, the project focuses on the ways colour changes according to its surroundings and affects perception. The museum describes colour as a continuing subject of scientific debate and philosophical disagreement, while emphasizing the practical knowledge artists have developed through the use, combination and organization of colour.
The exhibition takes Josef Albers’s investigations as a principal reference. Albers, an artist and teacher, developed exercises designed to train the perception of colour as a relational phenomenon. His work ‘Interaction of Color’ demonstrated that identical colours can appear different depending on the context in which they are seen. The exhibition presents this approach as a challenge to the idea that colour is a fixed property existing independently within objects.
From that starting point, ‘En vivo y en directo’ considers colour as an active tool in the perception of form, texture, depth and illumination. It also introduces the ecological approach to perception developed by American psychologist James J. Gibson, whose work describes perception as a dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment. In this framework, visual information is obtained through flows of stimulation generated by movement.
The exhibition further addresses the relationship between colour and pleasure. According to the museum’s presentation, contrasts and interactive colour relationships can guide attention and enrich visual experience, rather than functioning only as sources of aesthetic enjoyment. Art is positioned as a field in which these relationships are explored and refined to produce emotional and perceptual responses.
Visitors will encounter the exhibition through a combination of artworks and “experimental modules” intended to make the interactive properties of colour directly experienceable. The format is designed to connect theoretical questions about colour with an embodied encounter, linking artistic practice to scientific and philosophical inquiry. The museum’s programme places the exhibition in the Salas planta -1, with dates listed as 16 September 2026 to 7 February 2027.
A related masterclass, ‘La vida secreta de los colores’, is scheduled for 16 September at 7pm. The museum also directs visitors to ‘Color. Una explosión de ciencia’, a separate exhibition at the Museum of Sciences of the University of Navarra that approaches the nature of colour from a scientific perspective.
