Beschreibung:

Josef Albers Homage to the square: Sunday 1961 Oil on masonite. 101.6 x 101.6 cm (40 x 40 in). Signed with monogram and dated ‘A61' lower left and signed, titled and dated ‘Homage to the Square: "Sunday" Albers' on the reverse.
Provenance Sidney Janis Gallery, New York; Galerie Denise René, Paris Exhibited Boston, The Pace Gallery, Josef Albers November 1962; Saint-Paul de Vence, Fondation Maeght, L'Art Vivant 1965-68, April-June 1968, no. 4; Helsinki, The Art Museum of Ateneum, and Tampere, The Museum of Modern Art, ARS 69, March-May 1969, no. 1 Catalogue Essay Executed in 1961, the present lot is a prime example of Albers’ most signature body of work – ‘Homage to the square series’. In the 1950s, at the age of 62, and for over the next 26 years, Albers began working on his basic compositional scheme of three or four squares set inside each other, with the squares slightly gravitating towards the bottom edge. Producing hundreds of variations of these, Albers was exploring the narrow conceptual framework of the square, whilst revealing it as one of geometry’s most extraordinary perceptual complexity. Albers’ ‘Homage series’ adopted the shape of the square structure and related it mathematically to each other square size within the painting. Using a colour palette that was clearly thought-through, the artist aimed for each paintings’ shades to react with each other when viewed and processed by the human eye, causing optical illusions due to the eye’s ability to continually change the colours in ways that echo, support and oppose one another. Executing these paintings with a deliberate, careful technique using a minimum of tools and paint and avoiding any sort of painterly chaos, as that which had been embraced by the Abstract Expressionists of his generation – Albers would apply one base or primary coat on masonite, upon which he squeezed unmixed paints directly from the tubes and speared the paint evenly and as thinly as possible with a palette knife within each individual square. Whereas the early Homages are characterised by a sense of chromatic adventurousness and the rejection of inherited colour theories, the later Homages are far more subtle in their gradations. Prolonged looking at these seemingly simple compositions produces intense visual pleasure, not least because it is impossible to retain an accurate afterimage. But the Homages should not be understood as a self-absorbed formalist exercise. Albers never left the Bauhaus behind, insisting to the end on the ethical dimension of art: a heightened sense of perception, he believed, would result in a greater awareness of the world. Read More