- HOMEGROWN WORLD
- #HGCREATORS
- #HGEXPLORE
- #HGVOICES
- #HGSHOP
- CAREERS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
In Jaipur — a city historically defined by its colourful architecture — Annotations on Colour at the Jaipur Centre for Art explores the politics of colour in contemporary art. The exhibition brings together contemporary artists who treat colour as perception, movement, and atmosphere in their practice, connecting modern abstraction with the city’s long history of chromatic craft traditions.
67,800 years ago, ancient humans living in caves on the Muna island, in the Sulawesi province of Indonesia, placed their palms against the cave wall, and blew pigments on them — making the oldest cave paintings discovered till date. Like us, they used colour to decorate their cave dwellings, to make scenes of hunts, and to leave behind signs of their brief, but everlasting presence on Earth. Since before the beginning of history, humans have looked at colours and seen more than how the pigments catch and reflect light; we have seen in colour the reflections of our souls. Like the Russian painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky said, “Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.”
‘Annotations on Colour’, a group exhibition currently on view at the Jaipur Centre for Art (JCA), examines this relationship in the context of contemporary art. The exhibition, developed by JCA, brings together contemporary artists such as Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Hanif Kureshi, Anita Dube, and Thukral & Tagra to investigate how pigment produces optical tension, spatial distortion, and psychological response. The exhibition extends that premise into contemporary spatial practice: in these works, colour appears as luminous fields, intense material surfaces, and dispersed chromatic systems which alter the seer’s perception. In several works, perception itself becomes the medium. The act of moving through the gallery produces entirely different chromatic experiences.
The exhibition takes on a deeper meaning in Jaipur, a historical centre of art and craft traditions supported by the Kachwaha royal court. The Kachwahas of Jaipur patronised a distinctive school of miniature painting whose jewel-toned palettes of vermilion, lapis, and saffron were produced through painstaking preparation of mineral and vegetable pigments, ground into colour fields that shimmered against burnished paper. This engagement with the arts extended into the architectural character of the city itself.
In 1876, Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II ordered the old city to be painted terracotta pink to welcome Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, as the color symbolises hospitality. What began as a ceremonial gesture soon became municipal law. Today, the Pink City’s palette is strictly regulated: a continuous wash of sandstone and lime plaster that shifts throughout the day as Rajasthan’s unforgiving desert light burns, softens, and bends across its facades. Jaipur is perhaps the world’s most rigorously maintaned chromatic urban environment, and the perfect city for an exhibition exploring how colours shape our perception.
The works in this exhibition argue that colour is both ancient and urgently contemporary, because it is profoundly human. Colour is both physical and biological — rooted in the physics of light and the physiology of vision; but it is also cultural — shaped by history, belief, and collective memory. In a world haunted by the ghosts of algorithmic images and digital chromatics, these physical, tactile works insist on colour as lived experience: slow, demanding, and impossible to reduce into something simple.
Follow @jaipurcentreforart on Instagram.
