Josef Albers was one of the earliest students trained in the Bauhaus school of art, architecture and design in Weimar (Germany). After he completed his training, in 1923 he joined the faculty of the school, where he developed a prominent career until it closed in 1933 out of pressure from the Nazi party. As a result of that situation, Josef Albers and his wife Anni decided to immigrate to the United States.
There, he continued his teaching, first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale University in Connecticut. His teaching and research were in no way disassociated with his artistic output; quite to the contrary, he forged a perfect symbiosis between both facets of his career.
The exhibition being unveiled at Orfila will feature a carefully curated selection of oil paintings dating from 1955 to 1965, all from the “Homage to the Square” series. This series is regarded as Josef Albers’ most important and representative body of artwork. In them, in his steadfast quest for simplicity, Albers reaches the culmination of abstraction in the geometric shape of the square. Thus, all the works presented at the exhibition have the same basic composition made up of three or four squares embedded inside each other. Particularly noteworthy is “Double Homage to the Square”, given that he rendered very few works of this kind in which two studies engage in dialogue with each other.
Likewise, this simple geometric shape based on rectilinear fields allowed Albers to inquire into another of his overarching concerns, namely the visual experience of colour. Through these works, Albers strives to show viewers the mechanics of vision; in other words, he questions their visual reception faculties.
Viewers of the show will have the chance to discover the effects of connection and separation caused by colours set next to each other, as well as the illusion of movement and perspective.
Josef Albers’ works are present in prominent international collections and museums such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Kuntsmuseum Basel in Switzerland, the Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear in Spain, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in France, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Germany.
