In these line works, Josef Albers creates spatial illusions as he revisits motifs from his 1940s Graphic Constructions series. As with his experiments with color, Albers was interested in the discrepancy between what actually exists on the paper and the viewer’s perception; in this case, the viewer perceives a series of flat parallelograms and trapezoids as dimensional objects. Furthermore, the dimensionality of these structures constantly shifts so that at one moment it appears that a plane is thrusting toward the viewer, and the next moment it is receding. This spatial ambiguity is facilitated by Albers’s use of isometric perspective, in which parallel lines, which we expect to optically converge as they recede into space, instead remain parallel. This perspectival device, common in architectural and engineering designs, was later used by many of the artists in this exhibition, from Op Artists Shozo Nagano and Luis Molinari-Flores to Minimalist Donald Judd.
–When We Were Young: Rethinking Abstraction From The University At Albany Art Collections (1967-Present)