Carlos Cruz-Diez's Physichromie 1800 (2012) extends a series the artist debuted in Caracas in 1960 and continued, largely unbroken, for the rest of his career. Cruz-Diez was one of three founding figures, alongside Jesús Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero, of the Venezuelan Kinetic Art movement, and the Physichromies remain his signature body of work: an attempt, in his own words, to capture color as a physical, light-based event rather than a fixed pigment.

Built from strips of color inserted into and projecting from the support, the composition shifts as the viewer moves past it, passing from near-black at the top through bands of gold, burnt orange, coral, and deep maroon, as if a sunset had been compressed into a single frame. Cruz-Diez rendered this example, numbered 2 of 8, in chromography and pigment on PVC, the strip construction giving the surface a literal depth and flicker that no flat photograph can fully convey.

A closely numbered work from the same body, Physichromie 1839 (2013), is held in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, alongside further examples at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. More than fifty years into the Physichromie project, Cruz-Diez was still refining the same basic proposition: that color is not painted but experienced, generated anew each time a viewer steps in front of the work.