What happens when artists travel – into an unfamiliar light, into different colours, into a world they have never seen in this way before? The exhibition Light Becomes Color is devoted to two significant journeys to Tunisia in European modernism: Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky’s several-month stay in Tunis and its surroundings in 1904/05, and the journey undertaken by Paul Klee, August Macke and Louis Moilliet in spring 1914.

In Tunisia, the artists’ experiences of light, colour, ornament, architecture and landscape gained new intensity. Kandinsky translated impressions of landscape and architecture into powerfully coloured, rhythmically condensed compositions in which object, memory and decorative surface come together. Münter’s photographs show streets, markets, walls and transitional spaces with great precision; her paintings and works on paper also reveal how she transformed these impressions into reduced, clearly structured pictorial arrangements. In 1914, Macke created within just a few weeks a series of luminous watercolours in which street scenes, figures and urban spaces become rhythmic structures of surface and colour. Klee developed architecture, landscape and memory into sign-like pictorial orders. Louis Moilliet, in turn, found in Tunis a transparent use of colour in which architecture, street and light merge.

The exhibition brings together around fifty paintings, watercolours, drawings and photographs. It shows how travel impressions were translated into colour, line and surface, while also asking about the historical conditions of this way of seeing. Tunisia had been a French protectorate since 1881; around 1900, the European view of North Africa was already shaped by travel writing, postcards, tourist infrastructure, exhibitions, popular spectacle formats and older Orientalist images.

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