Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a textile designer, weaver, writer and printmaker, who was among the leading pioneers of twentieth-century modernism. Throughout her fruitful career she inspired a reconsideration of fabrics, both in their functional roles and as wall hangings, truly establishing thread and weaving as a valid medium for art. In her later years, Albers took up print-making, translating many of her persistent themes and ideas into two-dimensional form. But while Albers has been extremely influential for younger generations of artists and designers, her contribution to modernist art history has, until now, been rather overlooked. In 2018, a groundbreaking exhibition, together with this accompanying publication will present Albers’s most important works to fully explore and redefine her contribution to twentieth-century art and design, and highlight Albers’s significance as an artist in her own right, rather than alongside her husband Josef . Contextualising Albers’s early career at the Bauhaus, and her teaching years at Black Mountain College, this beautifully illustrated book will showcase major commissioned works, wall hangings, designs for commercial use, drawings and studies, jewellery designed and made by Albers and a selection of her prints. A series of short texts from a range of experts will focus on key works and themes, relating aspects of Albers’s practice to her seminal texts On Designing and On Weaving, and drawing in broader contextual material, including examples of Andean textiles which Albers collected and in which she found intense inspiration for her understanding of woven thread as a form of language. Illuminating Albers’s skill as a weaver, her material awareness and acute understanding of art and design, this much-needed publication is a celebration of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, and her endless creativity.
