Lot 40 D

For over 26 years, Josef Albers devoted himself to his most famous series of works which he called “Homage to the Square”. These works, in which he declined the same composition of colour squares set into each other, are each in themselves a tribute to colour and the individual, subjective perception thereof.
The artist’s affinity for mathematics underlies the series of works. Around 1950, he developed the composition scheme – in the final solution, the squares are shifted downwards, resulting in an optical compression and an impression of gravity that seems to affect the squares. With great care, he formed the shapes freehand from the inside outwards using a great variety of different pigments. He attached extraordinary importance to the artisanal process and the resulting expressiveness of the colour surface.
The colours continually interact with one another, always in the same basic composition, collide and push into each other, seem to float in front of each other or sink into each other. “Painting means allowing the colour to act,” Albers writes, “acting involves changing character and behaviour, mood and tempo. An actor makes us forget his name and personality traits. He creates an illusion and acts as someone other than who he actually is. Colour that acts loses its identity, appears as another colour, lighter or darker, more or less intensive, more luminous or duller, warmer or colder…” (cited from: Josef Albers. Interaction, exhib.cat. Villa Hügel, Essen 2018, p. 189f.)