Steel was Almuth Tebbenhoff's preferred material for over 20 years of her career, from the 1980s until around 2006. She says of it: "Steel had given me a skeletal structure and the engineering side of my brain loved to solve geometric puzzles". 'Yellow' is from this central period, with this wall-mounted structure playing on the distinctions of depth and hollowness, before being painted in bright yellow paint, where the artist is inspired by that which sign-writers often use.

Born in 1949 in Fürstenau in northwest Germany, Tebbenhoff moved to England in 1969, where she studied ceramics at the Sir John Cass School of Art from 1972 to 1975. Following that, she set up a studio in London and, for the next six years, made studio ceramics while she developed her ideas for sculpture. Between 1977 and 1979, she attended drawing classes and lectures at the Royal College of Art by invitation from Sir Eduardo Paolozzi. In 1981, Almuth established her current studio in a former church hall in Southfields, southwest London.

At first, she worked in clay and wood, but in 1986 she started a two-year course in metal fabrication at South Thames College, London. Her early pieces were monochrome—mostly grey—abstract explorations of space and volume through geometric devices. Since the early nineties, Tebbenhoff has been moving towards a freer mode of expression, creating explosive forms in bright colours through a steady evolution of processes, investigating her current themes of light, space and the origins of matter. In 2006, following a scholarship from the Fondazione Studio Sem, she undertook a three-month marble-carving residency in Pietrasanta in Italy, a place she returns to most summers to continue her marble practice.

In 1991, she was awarded the prestigious Krasner-Pollock Foundation grant. Tebbenhoff has taught at the Byam Shaw School of Art, the Loughborough College of Art and Design, and as visiting professor at the Stroganovska Institute in Moscow. She created the ‘Star of London’ award sculpture for the British Film Institute in 2009 and public works in St George’s Hospital, SW London, Chiswick Park, London, and a suspended sculpture for the library at Leicester University. In 2012 and 2013, she curated the annual sculpture exhibition for Leicester University and was awarded an honorary doctorate.

Tebbenhoff is a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Sculptors and has exhibited widely across the UK, also in Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, Poland, the USA, and Hong Kong. Her work ‘The RedHead Sunset Stack’ is currently on display at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.