Victor Vasarely studied medicine before he decided to pursue a career in art and enrolled at the Muhely Academy in Budapest. The academy’s teachings, based on Bauhaus principles with an emphasis on the basic design components of the cube, rectangle and circle, were formative to Vasarely’s approach to art. In the early 1960s Vasarely evolved his ‘Alphabet Plastique’, a grid-based system that established modular relationships between forms and colours. After exhibiting his new paintings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art alongside artists such as Bridget Riley in 1965, Vasarely was immediately dubbed the ‘father of Op Art’. He embraced tapestry during this peak creative period as an extension of his visual language.