Vladimir Weisberg was born in 1924, just a few years after the Russian Revolution, and died in 1985, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union; he lived his entire life within the Soviet system. Despite this, his artistic output was far from the state-sanctioned socialist realism. His early works, characterised by vibrant portraits, and his later, almost monochromatic still lifes and nudes clearly deviated from the official art ideology. Although he was accused of formalism and even pornography in 1962, he avoided serious consequences and remained a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR from 1961 until his death. During his lifetime, he exhibited both in the Soviet Union and internationally, including in Israel, Germany, and the USA.

A crucial turning point in Weisberg's artistic development occurred in the late 1950s. Influenced by Paul Cézanne's famous principle of viewing nature through the geometric forms of the cylinder, sphere, and cone, Weisberg began to create his distinctive still lifes. He has also been compared to the Italian Giorgio Morandi, an artist strongly associated with still life painting. For all three, still life was not merely a depiction of objects, but a way to explore deeper philosophical questions about perception, form, and existence.

During the 1970s, Weisberg, like Morandi, repeatedly returned to bright, almost hazy motifs with a limited number of objects. He abandoned the strong and contrasting colours that had characterised his early works and instead began to focus on subtle nuances of white on greyish-white that almost imperceptibly shifted towards purple or faint green.

Weisberg distanced himself from abstract art and instead developed this tightly realistic yet highly poetic expression, where "white on white" is not about emptiness, but about variations in light, form, and presence within an extremely limited colour palette.