Josef Albers

Homage to the Square
Albers’s earliest works were figurative drawings and paintings. His style became increasingly abstract a the Bauhaus where he began to explore abstraction and color, his primary lifelong preoccupations. He was fascinated by the ambiguities of visual and spatial perception. This preoccupation is central to his famous Homage to the Square series begun in the 1950s and continuing until his death. In this series, color assumes the main role of producing deceptive and unpredictable effects, causing multiple readings of the same hue depending on what colors surround it. Albers did not mix colors, putting the colors on the painting right out of the tube. He forced his viewers into a changing and dynamic relationship with his work, rather than accepting one visual truth…