Anni Albers

The Alan Cristea Gallery will be presenting the first major retrospective of the prints of Bauhaus artist and designer Anni Albers from 18 March 2010.

The exhibition will be the most comprehensive survey of her graphic work to date and will include nearly every print she has made, alongside studies, photographs and source material loaned from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The exhibition will be accompanied by the release of the catalogue raisonne of her prints - the first major monograph on this aspect of her work.

Albers primarily worked in textiles and, late in life, as a printmaker. At the Bauhaus, Albers experimented with new materials for weaving and executed richly coloured designs on paper for wall hangings and textiles in silk, cotton, and linen yarns in which the raw materials and components of structure became the source of beauty. Like Josef, she focused above all on her work-happy to pursue it whilst remaining detached from the trends and shifting fashions of the art world. In 1984, Albers wrote, "... to comprehend art is to confide in a constant."

Anni Albers (1899 - 1994) attended the Bauhaus as a student in 1922 where she later met and married her tutor, Josef Albers. After its closure in 1933, they moved to Black Mountain College where she taught until 1949. Her groundbreaking exhibition of textiles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1949 was the first of its kind and toured from 1951 until 1953, establishing Albers as the most famous weaver of the day. Aside from her work in textiles she was an accomplished printmaker and made first prints in 1963 at the Tamarind Institute.

From this point most of her time was devoted to the practices of lithography and screenprinting. Her earliest prints clearly show the influence of the weavings, with the drawn line taking on a thread like quality, but as her graphic work progressed, she developed a more hard-edge geometric style often making use of layering, rotation and subtle combinations of techniques to create hypnotic and at times, optically challenging, works on paper.