Homage to the Square, titles Josef Albers most significant body of work produced over the final 26 years of his life. Having enrolled at the Bauhaus School of Art in the early 1920’s, Albers found himself exposed to a curriculum which sort to explore the technical components of artist production. Inside this construct, teaching emphasis was placed on form, texture and the colour within the creative process. Staying on to lecture at the art school, Albers’ formal training was to be the foundations for his extensive lifetime studies in colour theory.

In 1933, under Nazi pressure the Bauhaus school closed and Albers emigrated to the United States where he settled in north Carolina and taught at Black mountain college. His pupils of this time included amongst others, Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg and his teaching was to be considered some of the most influential and progressive of its day. In 1950, at the age of 62, Albers embarked on his most celebrated series, titling each work the same: Homage to the Square. Each of the abstractions, combining either three or four uniquely coloured squares geometric placed within another, uses a basic composition to emphasise the complexity of colour perception. The regimented square framework, stripped of artistic licence, focuses the eye solely on the fundamental interplay between colours. This scientific practice is reiterated by the factual notes left on the reverse of each work, stating the exact colours used. For the viewer, the exploration of colour, combined with regulated forms, creates an intriguing illusion of space and depth to the painting surface. The present lot, which depicts three golden yellow squares, each darker than the outmost, offers the effect of three-dimensionality in such a way that the viewer could be looking down on a truncated pyramid.