David Zwirner is pleased to announce Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, a group exhibition on view in The Upper Room at the gallery’s London location. Presented in tandem with Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, displayed on the gallery’s ground and first floors, this exhibition will bring together works by a group of artists whose groundbreaking career trajectories were informed by the rich visual and intellectual innovations that emerged around Black Mountain College, the famed experimental liberal arts school in rural North Carolina that in the 1930s and 1940s became, as the writer Amanda Fortini recounts, “the site of a genius cluster.”
Presented in tandem with Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants.
Image: Installation View, Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, David Zwirner, London, 2023
This exhibition features work by a group of artists who overlapped at Black Mountain College in the mid- to late 1940s—including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Leo Amino, Ruth Asawa, Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Ray Johnson, as well as figures such as Sue Fuller and Sheila Hicks, who studied with and befriended members of this group at other notable institutions during the same period—and examines the threads of creative exchange that were interwoven when the paths of these teachers, pupils, and colleagues crossed.
Josef Albers drawing a lily for his class, April 1942. Photo by Tom Leonard. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC
Josef Albers drawing a lily for his class, April 1942. Photo by Tom Leonard. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC
One of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century, Josef Albers (1888–1976) bridged European and American Modernism throughout his artistic career. Albers was a legendary teacher at the Bauhaus until 1933 when he and his wife Anni Albers emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College.
“We do not always create ‘works of art,’ but rather experiments; it is not our ambition to fill museums: we are gathering experience.”
—Josef Albers, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957
Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937. Photo by Helen M. Post. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC
Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937. Photo by Helen M. Post. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC
Known for her pioneering graphic wall hangings, weavings, and designs, Anni Albers (née Annelise Fleischmann; 1899–1994) is regarded as one of the most important abstract artists of the twentieth century. Also a distinguished alumna and Bauhaus instructor, Albers played an essential role during her time at Black Mountain College. She elaborated on the technical innovations she devised at the Bauhaus, developing a specialized curriculum that integrated weaving and industrial design.
In addition, works on paper played a significant role in her practice, particularly after 1963 when she largely moved away from weaving to focus on printmaking. As in the present work, Albers often created designs from conglomerations of meandering or tangled lines that recall the intertwined threads of her weavings.
Wall V (1983) belongs to Albers's "Wall series" of 15 unique screenprints with watercolor, one of her final printmaking efforts. By this time, the artist's health began to decline and she had developed a tremor. Instead of trying to disguise this shakiness, she incorporated it into the composition of her work.
Sue Fuller, c. 1950. Photo by Eileen Darby. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs
Sue Fuller, c. 1950. Photo by Eileen Darby. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs
Sue Fuller’s (1914–2006) work testifies to the often-overlooked influence of craft traditions on the development of modernist abstraction. She created prints by pressing lace, fabric, and netting into the soft wax that coats the etching plate.
Frustrated with the limitations of manufactured textiles, she experimented with stretching and ripping pieces of lace to create more unusual designs. Eventually, the etching became an unnecessary step in Fuller’s work and she began to focus purely on creating sculptures from woven and wound patterns of threads.
“Black Mountain participants’ ambitions to transform habits of perception, systems of intention, and patterns of tradition have essential implications for understanding not only modernist but subsequent art practices.”
—Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College
Architect Buckminster Fuller next to a model of his Dymaxion house, March 17, 1930. Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Architect Buckminster Fuller next to a model of his Dymaxion house, March 17, 1930. Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was a renowned American designer and philosopher known for his groundbreaking inventions. Some of his best-known inventions include the geodesic dome, the futuristic Dymaxion house, and the Montreal Biosphere. His ideas and work went on to influence many artists and designers, such as John Cage and Ruth Asawa.
Conceived and designed in the late 1920s, the Dymaxion House was Fuller’s solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable, and environmentally efficient house. The word “Dymaxion” was coined by Fuller through the combination of three of his favorite words: dynamic, maximum, and tension. Although never built, the Dymaxion's design displayed forward-thinking and influential innovations in prefabrication and sustainability. The house was to be constructed from aluminum due to the material's great strength, low weight, and minimum maintenance.
Installation view, Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, David Zwirner, London, 2023
Installation view, Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, David Zwirner, London, 2023
American artist, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) is known for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Asawa's time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist, and she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn.
Ruth Asawa with Hanging Sculpture, 1951. Image © 2023 Imogen Cunningham Trust/Courtesy www.ImogenCunningham.com. Artwork © 2023 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Ruth Asawa with Hanging Sculpture, 1951. Image © 2023 Imogen Cunningham Trust/Courtesy www.ImogenCunningham.com. Artwork © 2023 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Asawa began making her looped-wire sculptures in the late 1940s, while still a student at Black Mountain. During the summer of 1947, Asawa traveled to Toluca, Mexico, where she taught art to children and adults. It was over the course of this trip that local craftsmen showed her how to create baskets out of wire, teaching her the looping technique that she would at first clumsily replicate, but quickly learned how to use to create increasingly complex compositions.
"By the early to mid-1950s, Asawa's commitment to manual engagement with the material, coupled with her interest in solving an ever-increasing and cumulative set of formal problems posed by her constructions in wire, led her to a series of elaborate permutations."
—Tamara H. Schenkenberg, Curator, Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.381, Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied, Three-Branched Form Based on Nature), c. 1965 (detail)
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.381, Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied, Three-Branched Form Based on Nature), c. 1965 (detail)
The present work is an example of Asawa's tied-wire sculptures, a series begun in 1962, which—like many of the artist's constructions—explore organic forms and processes. After having been gifted a desert plant whose branches split exponentially as they grew, Asawa quickly became frustrated by her attempts to replicate its structure in two dimensions. Instead, she utilized industrial wire as a means of sculpting and, in doing so, studying its shape.
Like her wire sculptures, Asawa's works on paper are often built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions, typically engaging directly with the natural world and its forms. Untitled (PT.088, Swans) (c. 1963) belongs to a group of ink-on-paper drawings depicting her surroundings in San Francisco, including a number of Plane (or, Sycamore) trees.
Leo Amino completes a construction in polystyrene at his Watts Street apartment studio in Greenwich Village, 1958. Photo by Steve Wada. © The Estate of Leo Amino
Leo Amino completes a construction in polystyrene at his Watts Street apartment studio in Greenwich Village, 1958. Photo by Steve Wada. © The Estate of Leo Amino
Japanese American artist Leo Amino's (1911–1989) plastic, wood, wire, and stone sculptures explore transparency and the dynamics of perception, articulating space, light, and color through geometric and biomorphic sculptural form. Born in Taiwan and educated in Tokyo, Amino immigrated to the United States as a young man in 1929 and settled in New York where he began developing his distinctive sculptural practice.
Amino was invited by Josef Albers to join the faculty of Black Mountain in the summer of 1946, two years after the college’s integration, where he taught alongside the Alberses, Jacob Lawrence, and Walter Gropius. The artist’s experiments with plastics emerged from dissatisfaction with his attempts to incorporate color into traditional sculptural media, anticipating the concerns of minimalist artists that would not gain widespread attention until the 1960s.
Leo Amino, Refractional #121, 1978 (detail)
Leo Amino, Refractional #121, 1978 (detail)
Amino dedicated the second half of his career exclusively to these ideas, producing a series of “refractional” compositions with light, color, and transparency. Amino deployed transparency in order to pose the question of the interdependency of subject and object through an optics of encounter, interpenetration, and absorption.
As Gregory Gilbert notes, “In the mid-sixties, Amino returned to casting his plastic works, but he began to combine his interest in light refraction with his earlier concern for coloristic effects.… In his works, Amino was able to create subtle but pure coloristic tones by overlapping layers of tinted resin. With this approach, Amino could develop a wide range of tonalities in his pieces by simply relying on a few basic colors.”
Leo Amino, Refractional #229, 1987 (detail)
Leo Amino, Refractional #229, 1987 (detail)
Elaine de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller’s Venetian Blind Strip Dome, 1948 Summer Session in the Arts, Black Mountain College, 1948. Photo by Trude Guermonprez. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC
Elaine de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller’s Venetian Blind Strip Dome, 1948 Summer Session in the Arts, Black Mountain College, 1948. Photo by Trude Guermonprez. Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC
Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) was a prominent American painter known for her skill as a portraitist. Her energetic figurative works provided an important perspective in the milieu of abstract expressionism. A student of Hunter College and the American Artists School, De Kooning gained prominence in the New York art scene early on in her career, eventually becoming a member of the Eighth Street Club.
“A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun. An event first and only secondarily an image.”
—Elaine De Kooning
Elaine De Kooning, Untitled, 1980 (detail)
Elaine De Kooning, Untitled, 1980 (detail)
The elusive American artist Ray Johnson (1927–1995) developed a conceptual practice that incorporated the concerns of Neo-Dada, Fluxus, and pop, while resisting classification within a single style. After leaving his hometown of Detroit in 1945, Johnson spent three years at Black Mountain in North Carolina, under the tutelage of Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lyonel Feininger, and Robert Motherwell.
Ray Johnson, c. 1968 (detail). Altered photo by David Gahr
Ray Johnson, c. 1968 (detail). Altered photo by David Gahr
Over the course of his five-decade career, much of Johnson’s tangible output took the form of collage. He referred to his early collages, made between 1954 and the early 1960s, as "moticos," an anagram for the word "osmotic," which he chose out of a book at random.
Donna De Salvo, former senior curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and curator of Ray Johnson: Correspondences at the Whitney, notes, “Through collage, he created a seemingly unending array of juxtapositions using the material evidence of the world—what he would find in newspapers or on the street, receive through the mail, hear in a phone conversation, or come across in a motel room on his way to give a lecture about his work.”
Installation view, Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, David Zwirner, London, 2023
Installation view, Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, David Zwirner, London, 2023
Sheila Hicks learning to knot with Rufino Reyes, Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1961. Photo by Faith Stern
Sheila Hicks learning to knot with Rufino Reyes, Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1961. Photo by Faith Stern
Sheila Hicks (b. 1934) is one of the most significant fiber artists of the postwar period. Studying under Josef Albers at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in the early 1950s, Hicks began her lifelong interest in the interplay between color and materials.
The fundamental idea of an artwork, and the transformative potential of its medium, is what remains paramount to Hicks. Color and scale become vital channels of communication, engendering complex tactile associations and emotive responses. This translation of formal quality to psychical effect manifests across compositions of varying size and spatial engagement.
Summer Arts Institute Faculty, Black Mountain College, 1946. From left to right: Leo Amino, Jacob Lawrence, Leo Lionni, Ted Dreier, Nora Lionni, Beaumont Newhall, Gwendolyn Lawrence, Ise Gropius, Jean Varda (in tree), Nancy Newhall (sitting), Walter Gropius, Mary “Molly” Gregory, Josef Albers, Anni Albers. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC
Summer Arts Institute Faculty, Black Mountain College, 1946. From left to right: Leo Amino, Jacob Lawrence, Leo Lionni, Ted Dreier, Nora Lionni, Beaumont Newhall, Gwendolyn Lawrence, Ise Gropius, Jean Varda (in tree), Nancy Newhall (sitting), Walter Gropius, Mary “Molly” Gregory, Josef Albers, Anni Albers. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State Archives of NC
“There is no such thing as a Black Mountain aesthetic, no dominant trend that unifies the artistic production of this small community. At Black Mountain, there was a desire to teach students to become more aware of the world around by instilling in them respect for the acts of both perception and process, all in the service of honing their critical skills.”
—Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957
On view in London
Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants
Inquire about works in Black Mountain College: The Experimenters
