Carlos Cruz-Diez's Physichromie Panam 106 (2013) belongs to the Panam sub-series of his signature Physichromie project, works produced at his Panama City atelier, one of three studios, alongside Paris and Caracas, where Cruz-Diez and his team worked across more than five decades. Cruz-Diez was one of three founding figures, with Jesús Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero, of the Venezuelan Kinetic Art movement, and the Physichromies, debuted in Caracas in 1960, remain the clearest expression of his lifelong project: capturing color as a physical, light-based event rather than a fixed pigment.

At nearly six and a half feet wide, the work is built from strips of color inserted into and projecting from an aluminum support, so that its bands appear to shift and reorganize as a viewer moves past it, the composition never quite the same from two vantage points. Cruz-Diez produced it using tools he adapted or invented himself for the Panama studio, rendering it in chromography and pigment on aluminum, the atelier's standard practice for large-scale Physichromies of this period.

Cruz-Diez's work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. More than fifty years after he first proposed that color could be generated by the viewer rather than fixed by the artist, Physichromie Panam 106 carries that idea into the monumental scale his late studio practice increasingly favored.