The painting Red Wall (1947-1956) belongs to the Adobe/Variants series, which preoccupied the artist for over ten years. The series, which consists of approximately a hundred paintings, was inspired by the artist’s 1947 trip to Mexico. However, Albers’s interest in Mexican culture came about much earlier. He first visited Mexico in 1935, and the following year he wrote to his friends Nina and Wassily Kandinsky: “Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art”.

The series Adobe/Variants combines two characteristic components of Albers’s art: his exploration of color theory and his background in design and architecture. The chief inspiration for Red Wall and other paintings from Adobe/Variants was Mexican architecture, particularly the sun-dried brick houses of the Native American Puebloans he saw in Mexico. The name of the series, Adobe, also points to this influence: adobe, a type of building material made of sand, clay, and water, later became a term that describes a style of architecture popular in desert areas of North America. Albers was especially influenced by the prominent Mexican architect Luis Barragan. Barragan and Albers met in Mexico and formed a close bond over their shared artistic concerns, Barragan expressed these principles in his architecture while Albers concentrated on the two-dimensional medium of painting. In Red Wall there is a clear connection to Barragan’s architecture, that was characterized by simple geometric forms and bold use of color.

The composition of Red Wall was inspired by the basic structure of the brick, Albers created a checkerboard-like pattern and painted each geometric shape in a different color. This format repeated itself in the Adobe/Variants paintings: it allowed the artist to explore his color theory by examining how colors interact when placed next to one another in a myriad of variations. The artist worked with a palette knife, he directly applied the paint from the tube and usually only painted a single coat. In Red Wall, he contrasted deep red tones with shades of turquoise and purple. The use of bold colors also related to his time in Mexico, the environment inspired him to focus on the expressive power of color and to expand his color palette.

Albers’s process of creation was meticulous and carefully documented the effects produced by the juxtaposition of different pure, unmixed colors. The scholar Nicholas Fox Weber explains the principle behind these experiments: “A change of colors transforms both the emotional character and the apparent physical action of forms. Two paintings of identical format with different color schemes can have radically different effects. Colors alter their appearance according to their surroundings”. The color experiments of the Adobe/Variants series also illustrate how the color combinations create a sense of depth and motion. The shapes in the paintings appear to move forward and backward, left and right across the picture plane. The arrangement of colors in Red Wall also produces this effect through the juxtaposition of reds with tones of purple and turquoise. The color contrast creates a sense of depth and some of the rectangle shapes appear to be leaping forward from the surface.