The core activity of Sikkens Foundation is to award, every few years, the Sikkens Prize to persons and organisations that, in the opinion of the board. make a special contribution to the goals of Sikkens Foundation. The recipient of the first Sikkens Prize in 1959 was the architect Gerrit Rietveld. Among those who came after were Le Corbusier (1963), Theo van Doesburg (1968) and Donald Judd (1993). A list of those awarded the Sikkens Prize during the last decades reveals that in most cases it went to individual artists and architects who had carried out pioneering work in the field of colour application. However, Sikkens Foundation does not restrict itself to art and architecture, but sees colour in a very broad context since it concerns a universal phenomenon. Prizes awarded to the Hippies (1970), the governmental department responsible for the Ijsselmeer polders (1979), the filmmaker Ettore Scola (1983) and the sanitation department of the city of Paris (1995) testify to this. The award of the 2004 Sikkens Prize to HEMA is also in line with this.