International film colour expert wins 2025 Len Lye Research Award

Colour is a very important part of film-making and was a primary concern for Len Lye, a pioneer in his use of colour in films. He said his first film A Colour Box (1935) “came about because I had been messing around drooling over the translucence of colour as I painted it directly onto celluloid”.

Barbara Flueckiger has been announced as the winner of the 2025 Evan Webb Award for Len Lye Research. The award, sponsored by the Len Lye Foundation, commemorates Webb who was a key figure in the re-discovery and restoration of that artist’s work. 

Barbara is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Zurich and the creator of Scan2Screen, an innovative scanning method which captures the colour of historical films in a highly accurate way. Her research on colour has been celebrated and put to use by film experts around the world. In 2023 when the Colour Group in Great Britain awarded her the Turner Medal for her colour research, her Turner Lecture focused on Len’s films.

Barbara’s application for the Webb Award was a proposal for further research on Len’s films in the Len Lye archive at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, and in other New Zealand archives.

On behalf of the Len Lye Foundation, Roger Horrocks and Wystan Curnow said: “There was a very strong field of entries for this year’s Webb Award, from Australia and the United States as well as from New Zealand."

"They included university theses on Lye and in-depth research essays on his films, paintings, sculptures, and links with noted artists and writers. We were very impressed by all this work, but saw Barbara’s work on colour as quite outstanding. We hope that the Webb Award will help to bring her to Aotearoa New Zealand where there will be lots of interest in what she has to share about Lye’s ground-breaking work in relation to the international history of film colour”.