Josef Albers. Minimum Means, Maximum Effect

The exhibition explores the artistic endeavours and teaching activities of Josef Albers, who was associated with the 20th-century’s most advanced experiments in art teaching (the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College)

Comprising more than one hundred works of art and other exhibits, in addition to furniture, objects, photography and a range of documentary material, this exhibition has been conceived and developed over the last three years in collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut.

Notwithstanding its retrospective character, the exhibition is not structured as a simple chronological survey of the artist’s work, although this would in itself be enormously enriching and instructive. Rather, it presents the work of Josef Albers as a project equally characterized by its coherence and its search for simplicity, its productive use of deliberately limited means and resources, its respect for manual labor and its emphasis on experimentation with color, taking material shape in a body of work with a marked poetic and spiritual content. Albers’ output is decidedly the result of a judicious administration of artistic resources. In its totality his oeuvre is the consequence of a true “economy of form”.

 Albers’ theoretical and practical ideas are further detailed in the catalogue through a documentary section of texts by the artist, many previously unpublished and the majority translated into Spanish for the first time.

Venue.- Fundación Juan March. . Madrid. Spain.
Dates.- From March 28th, to July 6th, 2014.

In conjunction with the exhibition in Madrid, the Fundación Juan March has organised an exhibition on the subject of Albers’ working process in his graphic work. Curated by Brenda Danilowitz, it will be shown at the museums in Palma (Museu Fundación Juan March, 2 April to 28 June 2014) and Cuenca (Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, 8 July to 5 October 2014). Albers’ graphic work, which he produced throughout his career, involves the same interest in economy of means, experimentation and innovation that characterises the rest of his oeuvre. Through a selection of more than 100 works loaned from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, this exhibition shows the variety of techniques used by the artist in his graphic work: intaglio printing, wood engraving, woodcut, lithography and silkscreen. In addition to prints, it also includes studies and drawings (many of them previously unexhibited), which reveal the artist’s working process and the way he gradually defined the image. Albers transformed idea into form, offering the viewer unexpected visual experiences.