joseph scissorhands: Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants

Josef Albers - Settled, 1954

"Every perception of colour is an illusion, we do not see colours as they really are. In our perception they alter one another." - Josef Albers.

Following my post last year about a visit to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and discovering a display devoted to a gift to the museum of works from the Anni and Josef and Albers Foundation (here), I decided to visit this exhibition at David Zwirner to see more of Josef Albers' experiments with colour. The majority of paintings are of Albers' Variant/Adobe series, a body of work inspired by the architecture and landscape experienced during repeated visits to Mexico. Adobe is Spanish for mudbrick and a style of earthen architecture prevalent in the South Western United States. The paintings take the form of a stylised house with two doorways. Also included in the exhibition are some interesting black and white photographs of Mexican pyramids and other architecture with historic, external decorative patterns which were influential on Albers painting practice. The paintings reference this style of vernacular architecture and the house in La Luz, New Mexico where Albers began making these paintings. As with his celebrated Homage to the Square series, the Variant/Adobe paintings adhere to a strict compositional format within which Albers experiments with seemingly endless colour combinations and the optical effects perceived with the reaction of each colour to its neighbour within the composition. Walking through the exhibition and watching it unfold, I wondered what influenced Albers' colour choices, as there were some subtle tonal combinations and other compositions in which the artist used a contrasting complementary colour scheme. It was fascinating to see such a large body of work using a repetitive composition and try to work out the reasoning for his colour choices. Albers was an educator working at two legendary institutions. As well as teaching at the Bauhaus, Albers also taught at Black Mountain College and gained a reputation as being one of the most influential teachers in the visual arts. The top floor of the galleries at David Zwirner are given over to students of Black Mountain College from the mid to late 1940s and others who studied with and befriended members of this group. There are some notable names such as Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Sheila Hicks (here), and Sue Fuller whose work I discovered last year (here). Another of the alumni whose work I rarely get to see is Ruth Asawa, who is represented here by a trio of wire sculptures based on natural plant forms. This exhibition appears to another in a trend in London of late focusing on colour and abstraction in art.