Behind Color and Light

Among the artists included in the legendary group exhibition Le Mouvement, held in Paris at the Galerie Denise René in 1955, Agam is a foundational figure of kinetic art and perceptual abstraction. Constructivist in origin, his works give expression to the Hebrew concept of reality that has been central to his artistic practice. “Reality is beyond the visible,” he observed. “It is the works that will lead and present reality.”1 Here, Agam distills the perceptual complexity of the visible as a sensorial experience available through abstraction. In this serigraph, the blue rows arranged in a gridded pattern appear to shift positions, a dynamic visual effect made possible by the juxtaposition of small geometric shapes of bright, contrasting colors. Agam’s aesthetics conveys the basic principle of Judaism, which proclaims that God can only be represented through non-descriptive and non-figurative means, and further celebrates its unification of spiritual, scientific, and artistic worlds.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and Patricia Ortega-Miranda.