Josef Albers' groundbreaking series Homage to the Square comprises roughly two thousand oil paintings. His continuous reflections and refinements for more than 25 years inspired numerous young minimal and conceptual artists in their search for a reduced formal language. This outstanding catalogue explores the secret of Albers' subtle aesthetic and unearths its preconditions: What is the significance of the square? How does his impression of color and its use as a material change during this period? Featuring studies on paper, archival materials, as well as essays by internationally leading Albers experts, Margit Rowell and Donal Judd, this richly illustrated publication sheds light on the various inspirations that influenced Albers early on in Europe and later in America, and illustrates the lasting impact of his art and thinking.

Sigmar Polke (born 1941) recently completed a series of 12 windows for the Grossmunster cathedral in Zurich, setting new standards for the mutual relationship between art and church. One group of seven Romanesque windows shows luminous mosaics of thinly sliced agate, some of it artificially colored, to produce pulsating blocks of back-lit color. Says Marina Warner, "The interior of rocks opens not only on unexpected colors... on once imprisoned now scintillating rays and gleams, but it also tunnels into the past, into the distant past of geological and cosmological millennia." For the remaining five windows, Polke designed images of figures from the Old Testament, based on medieval illuminations, which have themselves undergone transformation in the course of their long journey through time. Polke's figures now appear as radiantly contemporary icons created in colored glass, using a variety of traditional and customized techniques devised especially for this project.