Pace Wildenstein, New York; Waddington Galleries, Ltd., London
Exhibited
Catalogue Essay
Josef Albers began the significant and prolific Homage to the Square series in the 1950s, defined by the pictorial formula of the square. This seminal series influenced by the artist's Bauhaus education, placed its emphasis on the contrasting effects of form, texture and most importantly - colour. The chromatic interactions of flat coloured squares arranged concentrically on the canvas, provided an important template to explore the subjective experience of colour. The composition investigated various effects colours have on each other, and the illusion of depth created through the flat planes, where colours appear to be either receding or advancing into space. Working in a laboratory style studio, Albers used a systematic approach, appropriate to the rigidly defined elements in his work. In the series, the pigments were applied directly from the tubes of paint onto squares of masonite with a palette knife. Each painting was marked on the reverse with careful notations on the types and shades of color that he had used, in a record of the work's specific formal experiment. This illusion of depth changed the shift in emphasis from the perception of the artist and instead set out to challenge the viewer's faculties of reception. Albers sought to teach the mechanics of vision and to show the uninformed viewer how to see. Albers became a pioneer in twentieth-century modernism, teaching art theory at the Bauhaus and in the United States where his influence can be felt among important artists such as Peter Halley, Donald Judd and Robert Rauschenberg