What happens when artists set out on a journey – into a different light, into different colours, into a world they have never seen before? The exhibition Light Becomes Colour invites visitors to rediscover two pivotal journeys in European art history: the trip to Tunisia undertaken by Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky (1904/05), and that of Paul Klee, August Macke and Louis Moilliet (1914).

The light of North Africa changed everything. Macke painted watercolours with an energy that is unparalleled – in just a few weeks, he produced a series of watercolours that rank among the most luminous in European art history. Klee experienced an artistic turning point in Kairouan and recorded in his diary: “I and the colour are one. I am a painter.” And Gabriele Münter photographed street scenes, alleyways and markets with her Kodak camera – a body of photographic work that offers an unusually precise, female perspective on Tunisia at the turn of the century.

The exhibition brings together paintings, watercolours, drawings and photographs from these extraordinary journeys. It shows how encounters with the southern light, Islamic ornamentation and the architecture of the medinas paved the way for abstraction. Yet the encounter with Tunisia was also a European perspective, shaped by colonial structures that made travel possible in the first place and shaped perceptions of the country. The exhibition takes this ambivalence seriously and invites visitors to view the works both as testimonies to artistic transformation and as documents of their time.

Light Becomes Colour is an invitation to curiosity – about luminous images, fascinating backgrounds and questions that remain relevant to this day: What do we see when we travel? And whose world are we actually seeing?