Notes on Colour
works by Vicken Parsons, Jeff McMillan & David Batchelor
curated by Annushka Shani
23 June – 12 September 2026
Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College, Cambridge (UK)
We are delighted to announce that two of our artists, Vicken Parsons and Jeff McMillan, are part of the group exhibition Notes on Colour at the Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College, Cambridge this summer. Curated by Annushka Shani, the exhibition brings them together with London-based artist and writer David Batchelor — one of the most significant voices on colour of his generation, whose book Chromophobia (2000) examined the deep-rooted suspicion of colour in Western art and thought.
Notes on Colour departs from a simple yet profound question: what is colour, really? The three artists work with different materials and forms, but share a deep and prolonged preoccupation with the complexity, unpredictability, and sheer sensuous pleasures of colour. Their work rests on the edges of abstraction — a place where colour has space to breathe, without being entirely detached from the material world.
Vicken Parsons builds her small, intimate oil paintings on wood panel through thin, nearly transparent layers of paint — a slow and meditative process through which she opens up space rather than filling it. Her subjects are partial views of interiors and landscapes, some remembered, others imagined: a corner of a room, a doorway, a glimpse of sky. Within these quietly charged compositions, the eye moves continuously between an illusory depth and the picture surface. Colour in Parsons' work is never decorative — it is structural, atmospheric, the means by which light inhabits a space. As she has said herself: "Space and time are inextricably linked — I use time to make space."
Jeff McMillan's paintings begin not in the studio but outside it. He applies thin veils of oil paint to stretched antique linen, then hangs the works on the exterior facade of his London studio for months or years at a time — exposed to sun, rain, birds, and the pollution of the city. Only once this slow, uncontrolled transformation has run its course does McMillan bring the works back inside to complete them. The result is a body of painting in which colour is never fully the artist's own: it is shared with time, weather, and chance. Each work carries the marks of its particular history, making them, as McMillan has noted, "history paintings" in a deeply literal sense.
That Batchelor also appears as an essayist in Parsons' monograph Time is one of several connections that make this a more than coincidental gathering. Notes on Colour is a rare convergence of three practices that have each, in their own way, spent years listening to what colour has to say.
Notes on Colour is on view from 23 June to 12 September 2026 at the Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
