Josef Albers (1888-1976) is known as one of the most pivotal figures in 20th century art, renowned for his for his influential work as a painter, designer, and educator. Throughout his career in both European and American modernism, he focused on investigating the ways in which color and spatial relationships are perceived. Albers carefully considered how neighboring colors affect one another and produced visual effects that altered the viewer's sense of depth and space by employing straightforward geometric shapes. A German native, Albers first attended the Köngiliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Munich before moving to Weimar in 1920 to attend the Bauhaus. He joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1922, where he first worked with stained glass before transitioning to teaching design. Albers and his spouse Anni immigrated in 1933 to North Carolina, where they established the art department at Black Mountain College. During this period, Albers’s work began to gain recognition in the United States as he was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at the Addison Museum of American Art, Andover (1935), The Germanic Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge (1936), and the San Francisco Museum of Art (1940). In 1949, Albers moved to New Haven, Connecticut where he was appointed to head the new design department at Yale University School of Art. That same year, he began his Homage to the Square series, which he continued to develop until his death in 1976. This series was displayed in a significant exhibition by The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964, which toured twenty-two venues in the U.S. and Latin America, and in 1971, he became the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

More recent exhibitions of Josef Albers's work have been held at several prestigious venues, including the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura (2023), the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Tennessee (2022), and the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop (2022, 2019). His work has also been showcased at the Museo Villa dei Cedri in Bellinzona, the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona (2019), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2018), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2018), and The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2016). Albers’s works are also held in permenant collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.