Visual Perception

Art that plays on how the eye and brain see: illusion, colour interaction, optical vibration and shifting images.

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About

Artists have long exploited the gap between what reaches the eye and what the mind concludes. Andrea Pozzo painted a dome onto a flat canvas above the crossing of Sant'Ignazio in Rome in 1685, convincing only from a spot marked on the floor, and trompe-l'oeil painters for centuries tempted viewers to brush away painted flies or pick up painted letters.

In the 20th century perception became the subject itself. Josef Albers's Homage to the Square series, begun in 1950, nests squares of colour to show how each shifts according to its neighbours, a lesson he set out in the book Interaction of Color (1963). Victor Vasarely's Zebra (1937) builds two animals from curving stripes alone. Bridget Riley's black-and-white canvases such as Movement in Squares (1961) make a flat surface seem to buckle, and Yaacov Agam's ridged panels change image as the viewer walks past.