Vicken Parsons, David Batchelor and Jeff McMillan in conversation

To coincide with the opening of the exhibition Notes on Colour, the artists Vicken Parsons, David Batchelor, and Jeff McMillan will be in conversation with art historian Richard Calvocoressi. They will discuss the place and importance of colour in their own works, in art more generally, and in the wider culture.

The lecture will be held in the Sir Humphrey Cripps Theatre, located inside Cripps Court on Chesterton Rd. Attendees are welcome to stop by the College's main Porters' Lodge on Magdalene St for directions.

Tuesday 23 June – Saturday 12 September 2026

The Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College

Exhibition curated by Annushka Shani

But what is colour? A kind of bliss. - Roland Barthes, 1979

There is an ineffable, beyond-language quality to colour that cannot be easily pinned down. Notes on Colour is an exhibition which brings together the work of three contemporary artists, Vicken Parsons, David Batchelor and Jeff McMillan, for whom colour has been an abiding preoccupation over many years. These three artists make works which employ different materials, take different forms and address different questions, yet are linked by a deep and prolonged interest in the complexity, unpredictability, and sheer sensuous pleasures of colour. Each artist’s work rests on the edges of abstraction, without being fully abstract: a place where colour has space to breathe, without being entirely detached from the material world.

Colour is stronger than language. - Louise Bourgeois, 1992

Vicken Parsons

Vicken Parsons was born in Hertfordshire in 1957. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1975 and 1979. She makes small, intimate paintings on plywood panels using thin layers of oil paint as well as 3-dimensional works in a series called Painted Objects. Her paintings usually originate in the experience of architecture or landscape but are all primarily concerned with space and light. Parsons has exhibited extensively in the UK and Europe and her paintings are in significant public collections around the world including Tate; Government Art Collection, U.K.; Belvedere Museum, Austria; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Museum Voorlinden, The Netherlands and the Arts Council Collection, U.K. Parsons lives and works in London and is represented by Cristea Roberts Gallery.

David Batchelor

David Batchelor is an artist and writer based in London. He was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1955. He studied Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham (1975-78), and Cultural Theory at Birmingham University (1978-80). For over thirty years Batchelor has been concerned with the experience of colour within a modern urban environment, and with historical conceptions of colour within Western culture. His work comprises sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, animation and textiles. Batchelor has exhibited widely in the UK, continental Europe, the Americas and, more recently, the Middle East and Asia. Batchelor has also written a number of books and essays on colour theory, including Chromophobia (2000); the anthology Colour (2008, editor); and The October Colouring-In Book (2015). He is currently preparing a new book, Chromocopia, which will be published in 2027.

Jeff McMillan

Jeff McMillan is an American artist based in London since 1998. Born in Lubbock, Texas in 1968, he received a BFA from Texas Tech University (1991) and an MFA at the University of Alabama (1995). He has had recent solo exhibitions at Ivorypress, Madrid (2025), and Kristof De Clercq Gallery, Ghent (2024, 2021 and 2018). In 2023 McMillan was Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, California, and in 2020 was Abbey Painting Fellow at the British School at Rome. His work is in collections including Tate, London; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands and San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas.

Annushka Shani

Annushka Shani is a curator, writer, and practising psychoanalyst.

Open
Monday to Friday 2–4 pm; Saturday 2–6 pm

Closed
Sunday

To access the exhibition, please call in via the Porters' Lodge on Magdalene Street.

The exhibition website can be found here.