In this work, Albers revisits a motif he first explored in the 1940s in his series To Monté Alban. In 1933, when the Nazis shut down the Modernist art school The Bauhaus where he taught, Albers came to teach in the United States. From here he made several visits to Mexico in the 1930s and early 1940s, where he photographed the rectangular stepped pyramids and sacred ball courts at the Mesoamerican ceremonial site Monte Albán. The rectilinear designs of the structures resonated with Bauhaus architecture and design—pure geometric cubes and boxes, also seen in the International Style of architecture—as well as Albers’s painterly interest in geometric abstraction. Albers renders an aerial view of the pyramids and thereby generates spatial illusions common in Op Art. At times the flat surfaces appear to be platforms on the top of a stepped pyramid, but at other times seem to sink down below.
–When We Were Young: Rethinking Abstraction From The University At Albany Art Collections (1967-Present)