Carlos Cruz-Diez moved from his native Caracas to Paris in 1960. He is a major protagonist in the field of kinetic and Op Art, a movement based on "an awareness of the instability of reality."

Inspired by such artists as Georges Seurat and Josef Albers, his work focuses on the kinetic energy of color and its existence as an autonomous and evolving reality, independent from form or structure. Much of his work, in particular his Physichromie series, is created by plotting lines of contrasting color alongside each other, creating an illusion of movement as the viewer's position relative to the artwork shifts.