Affinities: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee

 

March 13–April 19, 2025

David Zwirner: 537 West 20th St. 

 

Paul Klee, Garten stillleben (Garden still life), 1924; Josef Albers, Gitterbild (Grid Mounted), c. 1921-1922; Anni Albers, Red Meander, 1954

 

 

첼시의 데이빗 즈워너 갤러리가 기하학적 추상화가 트리오 파울 클레, 애니 알버스와 조셉 알버스의 3인전 'Affinities: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee'(3/13-4/19)을 연다. 

 

1920년 독일 출신 조셉 알버스(Josef Albers, 1888-1976)가 바이마르에 설립된 바우하우스에 입학했다. 이듬해엔 파울 클레(Paul Klee, 1879-1940)는 바이마르에 설립된 바우하우스의 강사진에 합류했다. 1922년 스위스 출신 독일 화가 애니 프라이치만(Anni Fleischmann, 1899-1993)이 바우하우스에 입학해 클레의 직조 과정을 수강했다. 1925년 조셉과 애니는 결혼했고, 애닐리즈 알버스는 1929년부터 바우하우스에서 강의했다. 바우하우스는 1925년 데사우로 이전한 후 알버스 부부는 파울과 릴리 클레 부부와 이웃이 되었다. 

 

1919년 건축가 발터 그로피우스가 바이마르에 설립한 미술학교 Staatliches Bauhaus(바우하우스 주립대학)는 공예와 미술을 결합하는 Gesamtkunstwerk(종합예술) 디자인 접근방식으로 유명해졌다. 바우하우스 운동은 이후 예술, 건축, 그래픽 디자인, 인테리어 디자인, 산업 디자인 및 타이포그래피의 발전에 큰 영향을 미쳤다. 파울 클레를 비롯, 바실리 칸딘스키, 라슬로 모홀리나지 등이 강의했다. 

 

한편, 뉴욕현대미술관(MoMA)는 애니 알버스의 직물 디자인을 조명하는 'Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction'(4/20-9/13, 2025)을 연다. 

 

"독특한 문화유산 우리의 보자기에는 몬드리안이 있고, 폴 끌레도 있다. 현대적 조형감각을 유럽을 훨씬 앞질러 드러내고 있다. 그러면서 그 표정은 그지없이 담담하다. 마치 잘 갠 우리의 가을 하늘처럼 신선하다. 그것은 어느 개인의 폐쇄된 자의식에서 풀려나 있기 때문이다. 그것은 그대로 익명성의 느긋함을 말해주고 있다. 우리 배달겨레의 예술감각이요 생활감정이다. 거기에는 기하학적인 구도와 선이 있고, 꼴라쥬의 기법이 있다. 가장 먼 거리에 있는 것들끼리의 결합, 쉬르리얼리즘이 있다. 그러나, 그것은 또한 가장 기능적이고, 실용적이다. 그렇다. 그것은 또한 가장 격조 높은 미니멀 아트가 되고 있다."

-김춘수(1922-2004)의 '보자기 찬(讚)'-

Affinities: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee

 

March 13–April 19, 2025

David Zwirner: 537 West 20th St. 

 

David Zwirner is pleased to announce Affinities: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, curated by Nicholas Fox Weber. On view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in Chelsea, this exhibition presents the work of these three artists who overlapped at the Bauhaus during the 1920s and early 1930s and who greatly respected one another’s work. The exhibition features an extensive and varied selection of works by the Alberses from The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and notable works by Klee on loan from institutional and private collectors, as well as additional Klee works from the collection of Alain and Doris Klee. Additional support for the exhibition has been generously provided by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

 

In 1921, Paul Klee joined the faculty of the recently established Bauhaus in Weimar as a “form master,” one of the senior instructors at the school. The previous year, Josef Albers had arrived as a student before overseeing the glass workshop and later the preliminary design course. Though Josef never studied with the older Swiss-born German artist, Anni Albers (née Fleischmann; she married Josef in 1925), who came to the Bauhaus in 1922, took a weaving course with Klee and attended his lectures.

 

She would also come to teach at the school starting in 1929. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, the Alberses became neighbors of Paul and Lily Klee, their son Felix, and their cat Fritz. Though Klee was quite reserved, Anni in particular expressed reverence for his art and instruction, stating that he “had more influence on my work and my thinking by just looking at what he did with a line or a dot or a brush stroke.”

 

Anni Albers, interview, July 5, 1968, Oral History Program, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed online. Affinities will present works by all three artists from their time at the Bauhaus as well as from their later years, showcasing their distinct but overlapping aesthetic styles. Works from the Bauhaus era include paintings and works on paper and board by Klee that are composed of dramatic geometric arrangements with vivid palettes that visualize the centrality of color and line to his practice. Two of Josef Albers’s earliest glassworks—composed of grids and variously shaped pieces of stained glass, respectively—are singular examples of his art from this period. Also on view will be Anni Albers’s Wallhanging (1924), one of only a handful of the artist’s extant textile works from the 1920s, an extraordinarily innovative exploration of minimalist form.

 

Later works by the artists include those by Klee featuring more loosely rendered subjects and arrangements of forms, which are representative of his increasingly diaristic visual practice during his later years. Textiles and works on paper by Anni Albers from the decades after the Bauhaus speak to her endlessly inventive and novel engagement with color, and linear and geometric form, which she explored in textiles, prints, and in drawings. Several notable examples of Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square paintings—his best known and most celebrated body of work—will be on view, as well as singular paintings and studies from his time at Black Mountain College that blend his Bauhaus-era interests with his fascination in Mesoamerican art. Taken together, the selection of works reveals how each artist’s work continued to evolve while still retaining formal and compositional elements that extend back to their time together in Weimar and Dessau.

 

Though Klee and the Alberses have been exhibited together in thematic and historical shows on the Bauhaus, the three of them together have never before been the direct focus of an exhibition. This groundbreaking show provides a unique opportunity to see their works in dialogue. What comes through is the rich humor and perpetual wish for experimentation, the playfulness and profundity of their exuberant art. As Fox Weber writes, “Neither Paul Klee nor Anni nor Josef imitated one another, but they shared certain goals. Their art was a celebration—of color, of form, of the value of art that was not a personal revelation but was, rather, an ode to the universal. This exhibition has been created to unite the work of these three timeless artists and to reveal the rich affinities of work that is salubrious and uplifting.”

 

This exhibition precedes a major survey of Anni Albers’s work that will be presented at the Zentrum Paul Klee from November 2025 to February 2026. The traveling exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke and featuring works by Anni Albers, will open at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in April 2025.

 

Paul Klee (1879–1940) counts among the truly defining artists of the twentieth century, exploring and expanding the terrain of avant-garde art through work that ranges from stunning colorist grids to evocative graphic productions. Klee taught for a decade, from 1921 to 1931, at the Bauhaus and the novelty of his work and ideas established him as one of the institution’s foremost instructors. He was associated with some of the most important art movements of the twentieth century, such as expressionism, cubism, and surrealism, yet his practice remained highly individualistic and distinct; it was never encapsulated by the concerns of a movement or reducible to the modernist binary of abstraction and figuration. 

 

Nicholas Fox Weber, curator’s statement for Affinities: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, February 2025. Known for her pioneering graphic wall hangings, weavings, and designs, Anni Albers (née Annelise Fleischmann; 1899–1994) is considered one of the most important abstract artists of the twentieth century, as well as an influential designer, printmaker, and educator. Across the breadth of her career, she combined a deep and intuitive understanding of materials and process with her inventive and visually engaging exploration of form and color. Her innovative textiles from her time at the Bauhaus, at once functional and aesthetic, were the first to combine avant-garde geometric abstractions with weaving.

 

Albers was deeply influenced by pre-Columbian art and textiles, which she encountered on trips to Mexico during her time teaching at Black Mountain College between 1933 and 1949. She went on to employ long-forgotten techniques discovered through her in-depth study and collection of these works, leading eventually to the creation of her pictorial weavings of the 1950s. After 1963, she largely moved away from weaving to focus on printmaking and drawing as well as a select number of commissions that likewise engaged her singular approach to composition, creating numerous abstract motifs that—like her weavings—set up a dynamic play between figure and ground.

 

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was one of the most influential abstract painters and art teachers of the twentieth century. Albers’s artistic career, which bridged European and American modernism, consisted mainly of a tightly focused investigation into the perceptual properties of color and spatial relationships. Working with simple geometric forms, Albers sought to produce the effects of chromatic interaction, in which the visual perception of a color is affected by the hues adjacent to it. Albers’s precise application of color also created plays of space and depth, as the planar colored shapes that make up the majority of his works appear to either recede into or protrude out of the picture plane.