Anni Albers: Work With Materials
Syracuse University Art Museum, New York, US
25.08. – 11.12.2022

Comprising over 100 objects from the collection of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Anni Albers: Work with Materials spans the artist and designer’s wide range of production over a career of seven decades. Taking its title from her 1937 essay of the same name, the exhibition highlights the nimbleness with which Albers moved between mediums. It emphasizes her fluid transitions between creating artwork and designing more functional and commercial objects. Albers’s drawings, prints, textile samples, rugs, and writings demonstrate a wide-ranging curiosity and multi-faceted proficiency.

Foregrounding the transition from weaver to printmaker that Albers made in the 1960s, the exhibition begins with Connections, a series of nine silkscreen prints from 1983 in which Albers recreated images from every decade of her long career. The exhibition proceeds to show in greater detail the visual and material connections that drove her evolving studio practice.

In weaving, designing, and printmaking, Albers’s faith in the power of abstraction never wavered. Throughout her widely varied, yet consistent and focused output, we see an artist who understood material not only as a vehicle to carry ideas, but more importantly for its physical and structural potential. As she put it, “if we want to get from materials the sense of directness, the adventure of being close to the stuff the world is made of, we have to go back to the material itself, to its original state, and from there on partake in its stages of change.”