A.R. Penck, Aysha E Arar, Bri Williams, Douglas Gordon, Ilya Kabakov, Josef Albers, Judit Reigl, Latifa Echakhch, Marie Hazard, Nicolas Jasmin, ReschWilleit, Yudith Levin
Red is the first color to enter our world. It pulses behind closed eyelids, floods the skin when we’re born, and warms the earliest stories told around fire. Long before written language, humans marked their surroundings — and themselves — with red ochre, one of the very first pigments ever used. It is the color of life — circulating, oxygenated, urgent — and the color of danger, warning, and desire. Red announces itself before meaning is even formed.
This exhibition gathers works that approach red as pigment, signal, sensation, and metaphor. Here, red becomes both body and language: the flush that rises uninvited, the slow bruise turning toward violet, the heat of emotion surfacing before words can catch it. It is the mark of intimacy and the sign of rupture, the residue of touch and the stain of violence.
Red has always carried the weight of power—of flags, borders, currencies, and revolutions. It is the color we are told to stop at, but also the color that pushes us forward, demanding recognition. In these works, red becomes a threshold: the limit at which perception sharpens, when the world seems suddenly too bright, too full—when we “see red.”
By tracing red across skin, material, memory, and abstraction, the artists in this exhibition reveal how a single color can be both universal and intensely personal. Red is the heartbeat of this show: a reminder that to feel, to blush, to bleed, to burn with anger or love, is to be alive.
Caroline Heinzmann
Curator : Caroline Heinzmann