In 1949, Josef Albers began a series he called Homage to the Square. In it he explored two primary aspects of color: its relativity and its subjectivity. Relativity refers to how our perception of a color changes based on other colors adjacent to it, and subjectivity is the way the experience of color is unique to every individual. Albers investigated these concerns in hundreds of paintings featuring either three or four nesting squares. This print echoes the composition and color choices he made in the Homage to the Square series, and similarly demonstrates the optical interactions that occur in this formula. In SK-ED, the three outermost squares appear to recede into the interior of the print; meanwhile, the brightest and smallest square seems to sit far in front, radiating outward toward the viewer. Albers’s careful attention to color interactions turned a sequence of static squares into a dynamic illusion of floating planes.

Label from The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing, May 26–October 28, 2018