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Anni Albers
Constructing Textiles
The exhibition Anni Albers: Constructing Textiles is the first major exhibition to showcase the work of the important German-American artist and designer in Austria. From her beginnings at the Bauhaus through to her influential work at Black Mountain College and her theoretical studies, the show will shed light on Albers’s multifaceted oeuvre straddling art and design, craft, teaching, and art theory.
The exhibition is a joint project of the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT, organized in collaboration with the Belvedere, Vienna.
Curated by Fabienne Eggelhöfer (Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern) and Brenda Danilowitz (Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT).
Assistant Curators: Kai-Inga Dost (Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern), Kati Renner (Belvedere, Vienna)
The Exhibition
For the first time in Austria, a major solo exhibition will pay tribute to the diverse work of artist and designer Anni Albers (1899–1994). Albers’s inventive and experimental creative output began at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. In 1933 she emigrated to the USA, where she soon became established as a versatile artist. She explored complex woven structures and introduced innovative materials as her threads. In addition to pictorial weavings—works of art in their own right—Albers produced new textiles for buildings and interiors that she termed “useful objects.” Albers viewed weaving as the most progressive form of modern architectonic thinking. Her deep understanding of her material and its applications makes Anni Albers’s work seem current and relevant to the challenges we now face concerning energy and material resources.
Featuring many works from all creative periods—starting with her early days at the innovative Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, followed by her time at the legendary Black Mountain College, and through to the 1980s—the exhibition presents Albers’s multifaceted career that straddled textiles and architecture, weaving and construction, past and present. It includes material studies, textile patterns and designs, pictorial weavings, large-scale room dividers, rugs, curtain fabrics, and theoretical writings.
Biography
Anni Albers (1899–1994) is an important German-American textile artist, designer, and art theorist. Born Annelise Fleischmann in Berlin, she first studied painting before transferring to the Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1922. In keeping with ideas about gender roles at that time, she was assigned to the weaving workshop. After graduating, Albers took charge of the weaving workshop in 1931 and became one of the few female workshop heads at the Bauhaus.
Albers’s work is characterized by geometric patterns, restrained color palettes, and functional design. She saw textiles not merely as decorative objects but as an art form in their own right. In 1949 she was the first textile artist to be honored with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In the mid-1960s she made her famous tapestry Six Prayers, commissioned by the Jewish Museum New York as a memorial to the Holocaust. Beside her artistic practice, Albers also published theoretical writings, including the influential book On Weaving (1965), which is still considered a seminal work on textile art today.
Anni Albers was a defining influence on textile design and promoted its recognition as a serious art form. Her work continues to influence artists, designers, and architects across the world to this day.
