Anni Albers: Constructing Textiles

Anni Albers is an important artist and designer of the 20th century. Her designs are exemplary today for a new generation of artists and designers working with textile materials. Albers herself regarded her work as an adventure and advocated in her writings for the "power of creation." Her experimental work tested new materials and textures. This catalog highlights her work not only in textile art but also as a writer and pioneering thinker. Albers' textile works such as room dividers and curtains testify to spatial thinking, which is examined here for the first time. Above all, her focus on the principles of limitation and durability as well as a careful handling of the material are of particular relevance today. Contributions from contemporary architects, designers, and theorists illuminate this important focus of spatial thinking in her work. Three central texts by Albers from the 1940s to 1960s, including the eponymous "Constructing Textiles," are made accessible in German for the first time.

Anni Albers (1899, Berlin-1994, Orange, CT) was a German-American textile artist, weaver, and graphic artist. She studied and later taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, she emigrated with her husband Josef Albers to the USA. There she taught at the newly founded Black Mountain College art school. From the 1950s onwards, she worked in Connecticut as a freelance textile artist; she designed the large-scale Holocaust memorial Six Prayers (1966/67) commissioned by the Jewish Museum, New York.