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Josef Albers, Chichen Itza, Mexico, ca. 1940. Gelatin silver print, image: 4 9/16 x 6 1/2 inches (11.6 x 16.5 cm); sheet: 5 x 6 15/16 inches (12.7 x 17.6 cm), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1996. © 2017 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Exhibition
Josef Albers in Mexico
3 Nov 2017 – 18 Feb 2018
Regular hours
- Friday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Monday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 11:00 – 18:00
Address
- 1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street)
- New York
New York - NY 10128
- United States
On his first trip to Mexico, in 1935, Josef Albers encountered the magnificent architecture of ancient Mesoamerica. He later remarked in a letter to Vasily Kandinsky, a former colleague at the Bauhaus, “Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art.”
About
With his wife, artist Anni Albers (1899- 1994), Josef Albers visited Mexico and other Latin American countries nearly a dozen times from 1935–67. They saw numerous archeological sites and monuments, especially in Mexico and Peru. On each visit, he took hundreds of black-and-white photographs of the pyramids, shrines, and sanctuaries at these sites, often grouping multiple images printed at various scales onto 8 by 10 inch sheets.
Albers’s innovative approach to photography remains an underappreciated aspect of his career. This exhibition brings together his photographs and photo collages from the Guggenheim’s collection and various lenders. These works, many of which have never been exhibited publicly, suggest a nuanced relationship between the forms and motifs of pre-Columbian monuments and the artist’s iconic abstract canvases. Albers’s experiences in Latin America offer an essential context for understanding his paintings and prints, particularly from his Homage to the Square and Variant/Adobe series, examples of which are featured in this show.
