Anni Albers at Tate Modern

I’ve wanted to come and visit this exhibition for a little while so I was excited to finally make it! The exhibition is a very comprehensive record of the works of Anni Albers (1899-1994). Born in Germany and initially part of the Bauhaus school, she and her husband Josef fled to the US after the Nazi party closed Bauhaus in 1933. In North Carolina she became a teacher at the influential Black Mountain College for many years before leaving to follow her husband to New Haven, Conneticut in 1950.

Throughout her life, pattern was incredibly important to Anni Albers. She had diverse influences, from ancient textile traditions (particularly in Mexico) to modern art. Whilst weaving was her initial medium she later took up printmaking, always continuing to explore the possibilities within textiles e.g. knots, line, texture.

The exhibition is massive so I’m only going to look at a few of my highlights here. For me the key things I enjoyed were seeing the development of her designs from initial drawings to samplers to final pieces, her pattern development in printing and some of the pieces of ancient weaving that influenced her work.

I really liked these pieces where Albers had begun to play with texture as well as pattern, exploring more possibilities in terms of knot formation and texture and starting to break away from strict patterns.

Her work also looked great framed and these are pieces that she would have termed pictorial weaving. For me, this way of displaying the work conventionally changed how I interacted with it, standing back and looking at the pieces as a whole. It was interesting to see how frames can be used to label something as ‘art’. In reality all of what she was creating was artistic but we all have our perceptions of what makes art.

I’ve always loved geometry and pattern and the pieces Albers produced for Knoll textiles were definitely ones that I would have in my house! I don’t always think about the designers behind these fabrics and the display of these gave some insight into how they are developed.

As she moved into printmaking she continued to explore geometric designs using a lot of coloured triangles on screenprints. I also enjoyed her series of 6 ‘Mountainous’ prints, where she took a theme and developed it. All of them were white and simply embossed with no ink used. It was great to see them as a collection and I’d like to explore this process more myself.

This is a large fragment of Chancay textile from Peru (900-1430). It was wonderful to see a little of the history of weaving and begin to understand just how ancient and universal it is as an artform as well as a practical necessity.

Finally I’ll leave you with these images from when Albers had been exploring pattern further using anything that came to hand, from the ‘s’ of a typewriter to corn kernels to even pricking holes on a piece of paper with a pin. I loved the sense of experimentation and exploration in her constant search for pattern.

This is only a tiny fraction of what is a very comprehensive exhibition. I’d definitely recommend a trip to see it. It is very different from the usual exhibition you might see at the Tate and really stretched my horizons in an area of which I knew very little.