Anni Albers

Anni Albers (1899 - 1994), born in Berlin, Germany, was one of the most influential textile artists of the twentieth century. Admired for her pioneering wall hangings and textiles, Albers was also a prolific printmaker.

She was admitted to the Bauhaus in 1922. Having been refused entry to the Painting Workshop, on the grounds that she was a woman, she turned to textiles, deemed to be 'women's work'. In the Weaving Workshop she received tutelage from Paul Klee, among others, and approached the discipline with relentless investigation, regularly incorporating non-traditional materials into her compositions. She remained a key member of the workshop, becoming an acting director, until the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933. The following year Albers and her husband, Josef, moved to the USA to teach at Black Mountain College, North Carolina.

In 1963, whilst visiting Taramind Lithography Workshop, California, Albers turned her hand to printmaking and continued to work primarily in this medium until her death in 1994. Throughout the last 20 years of her life, she collaborated with some of the leading printers of the era, experimenting with lithography, screenprinting, embossing, woodcut and various intaglio techniques. Her first major print retrospective was held at Alan Cristea Gallery in 2010. 

Her influence has been vast. Through her work, teaching and writing, she has inspired and guided a large number of artists in directions that have now become part of the mainstream. In 1949, Albers became the first weaver to have a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the exhibition travelled to 26 venues throughout the United States and Canada. She was honoured with several more major exhibitions during her lifetime, and a touring retrospective on the 100th anniversary of her birth in 1999. In 2024 the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas exhibited a solo show tracing the artist's shift from weaving to printmaking in the 1960s. Further recent retrospectives also include Tate, London and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2018) and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2017). In 1965, Alber's seminal text, On Weaving, was published, remaining in print for two decades before being re-issued as a paperback in 2003. 

In 2022 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation gifted fifty-seven works to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, including thirty-five works by Albers, featuring both textiles and prints. A series of dual retrospectives of Anni and Josef's work have been exhibited at The National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels, Belgium (2024); The Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2023); The Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (2022); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Paris (2021).

Anni Albers died aged 94 in 1994, in Connecticut, USA.

Cristea Roberts Gallery is the exclusive worldwide representative for the prints from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.