While a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Charles Biederman first encountered the work of Paul Cézanne, an artist who had an enormous impact on his career. Searching for more progressive art, he moved to New York, where he exhibited alongside the likes of Alexander Calder and Charles Shaw; later he traveled to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Constantin Brancusi. But Biederman then abandoned city life for Minnesota, where he devoted himself to the search for a “new” art. There, in the early 1950s, he created the colorful, three-dimensional aluminum constructions that would preoccupy him for the rest of his career. Though inspired by Constructivism, Cubism, and De Stijl, Biederman favored natural observation over artistic theory. “One cannot go wrong with the truths of nature,” he said.