Anni Albers: Touching Vision

• Dates: October 6, 2017–January 14, 2018
• Curated by Manuel Cirauqui

 

• One of the Bauhaus’s most distinguished artists and a key figure at Black Mountain College, Anni Albers pioneered the reinvention of Fiber Art and the use of modern visual language in traditional crafts.
• Her aesthetic principles were shaped by a deep understanding of materials, particularly textiles and prints, with which she created remarkably subtle and intricate motifs.
• The exhibition features a wide selection of "pictorial weavings" illustrating Albers’s original take on modern and abstract painting’s concerns through textile work, understood as both an ancient art and a cornerstone of industrialized society.
• In 1963, Albers found in printing techniques a fertile terrain for new investigation. Experiments with screenprints, etchings, lithographs, and offset printing, were to replace her hand-made textile work in the 1970s onward.
• Albers always championed the great Bauhaus ideals, such as the wide distribution of design among the public. After she gave up her work at the loom, she went on to collaborate with various industrial manufacturers in the production of many designs for fabrics, also featured in the exhibition.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is pleased to present Anni Albers: Touching Vision, an in-depth survey of seven decades in the career of a pioneering figure in the field of Fiber Art. Organized in collaboration with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the show provides a chronological overview of Albers’s oeuvre while also revealing the connections between different periods and series, highlighting recurrent motifs and flashing ideas. Also emphasized are the compelling ways in which a deep insight of materials and techniques preceded visual development in many instances of Albers’s work.