Josef Albers, White Line Square VI, 1966

Christiane Paul: Josef Albers, in his Variant and Homage to the Square series, essentially explores color theory and the way we perceive color. 

Narrator: Christiane Paul is Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum.

Christiane Paul: So he is nesting squares or geometric forms in different ways that actually make us question what the foreground or background is, what kind of color we are looking at. And we think of Albers mostly in terms of color and perception, but what we are highlighting in this exhibition is that he's also using a rule-based system of actually creating those nested squares and nested forms. So you are also looking at instruction-based art.

What is important here is that ultimately he emphasizes the potential for variation, for generating all different kinds of variations. While we are looking at static images, there is this potential for the generation of more and more images and forms.