Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants

David Zwirner is pleased to present Paintings Titled Variants, an exhibition of work by Josef Albers on view at the gallery’s London location. Organized in collaboration with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the exhibition follows Josef Albers: Homage to the Square, a major 2022–2023 solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany.

The exhibition is presented in tandem with Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, on view in The Upper Room of the London gallery, which features additional works by Albers as well as several of his colleagues and students from the famed titular school.

Image: Installation view, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, David Zwirner, London, 2023

Location

24 Grafton Street London

Dates

February 28—April 15, 2023

Gallery Hours

Tues—Sat 10am–6pm

Artist

Paintings Titled Variants

Josef Albers with the Alberses’ car, Teotihuacán, Mexico, 1936. Photographer unknown

Josef Albers with the Alberses’ car, Teotihuacán, Mexico, 1936. Photographer unknown

Titled after the first exhibition of Albers’s Variant/Adobe paintings at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1949, Paintings Titled Variants focuses on a breakthrough body of work that was inspired, in part, by the art, architecture, and landscapes that Albers observed during his numerous visits to Mexico and the American Southwest, the artistic and cultural heritage of which provided a wealth of inspiration.

Pamphlet from the artist’s 1949 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York

Pamphlet from the artist’s 1949 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil on blotting paper

19 1/8 x 24 1/4 inches (48.6 x 61.6 cm)
Framed: 26 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches (67 x 80 cm)

“It was Albers’s ongoing mission to contradict reality and induce disbelief. At the same time as demonstrating the mutability of color, the Variants are sublime expressions of the poetry of painting and of the capacity of art to divert us from mundane concerns and immerse us in the beauty of what is timeless and universal.”

—Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Josef Albers

Familiar Front, 1948- 1952

Oil on Masonite in artist's frame

13 3/4 x 21 inches (34.9 x 53.3 cm)
Framed: 21 7/8 x 29 inches (55.6 x 73.7 cm)

The Variant/Adobe series initiated a new phase in the artist’s work in which the artist could follow a serialized format to experiment with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects—a method that would eventually lead to his renowned Homage to the Square paintings.

Installation view, Josef Albers in Mexico, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2017

Installation view, Josef Albers in Mexico, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2017

“Albers created long sequences of related works that reveal how even basic geometric patterns and a limited range of colors can yield a visual complexity that exceeds viewers’ capacity to perceive it.… Through his journeys to Mexico, this European émigré … discovered his fascination with the boundaries of aesthetic perception and blind spots in historical experience that not only resonate with 1930s modernist art, but also look forward to the 1960s avant-garde.”

—Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Josef Albers

2 Blues + 2 Greens, 1948

Oil on Masonite

21 1/2 x 26 inches (54.6 x 66 cm)
Framed: 22 7/8 x 26 7/8 inches (58.1 x 68.3 cm)

Josef Albers holding a West Mexican figure in front of Homage to the Square: Auriferous, 1958. Photo by Lee Boltin

Josef Albers holding a West Mexican figure in front of Homage to the Square: Auriferous, 1958. Photo by Lee Boltin

“The values apparent in Mesoamerican objects and structures dovetailed with the Alberses’ most cherished Bauhaus principles, especially economy of means, truth to materials and the pursuit of variation within specific boundaries.”

—Roberta Smith, critic, The New York Times

Josef Albers

Study for Untitled Abstraction (Painting on Victrola Gramophone Cover) , c. 1940

Oil on blotting paper

24 x 19 inches (61 x 48.3 cm)
Framed: 25 3/4 x 20 5/8 inches (65.4 x 52.4 cm)

Study for Untitled Abstraction (Painting on Victrola Gramophone Cover) is one of the earliest works to clearly demonstrate Albers’s interest in chromatic interaction. As the title indicates, this work was a study that Albers created for a painting he composed on the cover of a gramophone lid. As Nicholas Fox Weber writes, "The untitled abstraction of ca. 1940 … demonstrates the precise approach that characterizes even Albers's seemingly offhand work. Like the forms in so many of Albers's two-figure paintings of the thirties and forties, the two cloud-like central bodies have been conceived with great care.”

Josef Albers, Untitled, 1940–1941

Josef Albers, Untitled, 1940–1941

Installation view, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, David Zwirner, London, 2023

Installation view, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, David Zwirner, London, 2023

Narrowing down his medium to consist strictly of pure paint from the tube and refusing to mix pigments, Albers used the Variants to discover the myriad of ways in which the illusion of color change could be achieved by juxtaposing colors against one another, and how the relationships between colors can dramatically impact the appearance and experience of the work.

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil on blotting paper

18 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches (46 x 61.3 cm)
Framed: 25 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches (64.5 x 80 cm)

“It was only after he removed explicit linear gestures from his painting practice in his Variants and Homages—and thereby insisted upon color autonomy—that Albers achieved the demonstrative visual difficulty he desired.”

— Dr. Jeffrey Saletnik, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form

Josef Albers

Browns, Ochre, Yellow, 1948

Oil on Masonite

18 x 24 1/2 inches (45.7 x 62.2 cm)
Framed: 19 x 26 1/2 inches (48.3 x 67.3 cm)

Josef Albers

3 Red-Brown and Ochre, 1947

Oil on Masonite

24 1/4 x 36 1/4 inches (61.6 x 92.1 cm)
Framed: 25 1/4 x 36 7/8 inches (64.1 x 93.7 cm)

Josef Albers

Study for Graphic Tectonic , c. 1942

Ink on paper

17 x 22 inches (43.2 x 55.9 cm)
Framed: 19 1/4 x 24 1/4 inches (48.9 x 61.6 cm)

The exhibition features a group of Albers’s Graphic Tectonics drawings, which he began as studies for a later series of zinc plate lithographs by the same name. The drawings’ maze-like lines evoke those found in the stepped pyramid complexes the artist photographed during his travels, which he often compiled into photocollages mounted on cardboard.

Josef Albers, Josef Albers in Mitla, Mexico, 1936–37, photo negative. © 2023 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Josef Albers, Josef Albers in Mitla, Mexico, 1936–37, photo negative. © 2023 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Josef Albers

Mitla, Mexico, c. 1956

Gelatin silver prints and postcards mounted on cardboard

8 x 12 inches (20.3 x 30.5 cm)
Framed: 12 1/4 x 16 1/4 inches (31.1 x 41.3 cm)

“Even in the assemblages of his collages … Albers used the square or rectangular prints exclusively, mounted according to a grid with virtually no overlap. Yet in the same way that Albers’s radical reimagining of the potential of painting would unfold within the strict confines of a nested square, so, too, does his series of photocollages open up a universe of possibility within a willfully limited range of variables.”

—Sarah Meister, Executive Director, Aperture

Installation view, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, David Zwirner, London, 2023

Installation view, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, David Zwirner, London, 2023

While the Homage to the Square paintings exclusively feature nested squares, the design utilized in the Variant/Adobe series is more complex: an abstract architectonic form built around two symmetrical rectangles.

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947-1952

Oil on Masonite

14 1/4 x 27 1/8 inches (36.2 x 68.9 cm)
Framed: 15 x 28 inches (38.1 x 71.1 cm)

“Albers by mid-century knew and trusted his material so well that he could completely submerge his ego in his material-color. In doing this he provided a model for the ‘specific objects’ of Donald Judd and other so-called minimalists in the 1960s.”

—Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil on blotting paper

19 1/2 x 24 1/4 inches (49.5 x 61.6 cm)
Framed: 24 5/8 x 30 1/4 inches (62.5 x 76.8 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil and pencil on blotting paper

17 1/2 x 24 1/8 inches (44.5 x 61.3 cm)
Framed: 24 3/4 x 31 3/8 inches (62.9 x 79.7 cm)

One of Albers’s names for this series, Adobe, reinforces their architectural quality and may refer to the “clay house” in La Luz, New Mexico, in which he began making these works. The name also reflects the influence of pre-Columbian art and architecture on the series, which resembles a graphic rendering of a typical Mexican adobe dwelling.

Josef Albers, Adobe building, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1937, photo negative. © 2023 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Josef Albers, Adobe building, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1937, photo negative. © 2023 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Josef Albers

Settled, 1954

Oil on Masonite

16 1/4 x 24 3/8 inches (41.3 x 61.9 cm)
Framed: 17 1/4 x 25 3/8 inches (43.8 x 64.5 cm)

“Anni and Josef Albers were not the only artists who traveled to Latin America and were fascinated by its cultures. Their enthusiasm for ancient, non-European art coincided with the spirit of classic modernity. Yet at the same time we can note that in their case this encounter produced an exceptionally productive artistic impulse.… Only rarely do ancient art and modernity connect as deeply and naturally as here.”

—Heinz Liesbrock, Director Emeritus, The Josef Albers Museum

Installation view, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, David Zwirner, London, 2023

Installation view, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, David Zwirner, London, 2023

Also on view in London

Black Mountain College: The Experimenters

Inquire about works by Josef Albers

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2023.

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1956-1958

Oil on Masonite

17 3/4 x 25 3/8 inches (45.1 x 64.5 cm)
Framed: 18 1/2 x 26 1/8 inches (47 x 66.4 cm)

Josef Albers

Adobe: Yellow Front, 1959

Oil on Masonite

22 x 26 1/8 inches (55.9 x 66.4 cm)
Framed: 22 1/2 x 26 3/4 inches (57.2 x 67.9 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant: Orange Façade, 1959

Oil on Masonite

23 3/8 x 26 3/8 inches (59.4 x 67 cm)
Framed: 24 x 27 1/2 inches (61 x 69.9 cm)

Josef Albers

3 Red-Brown and Ochre, 1947

Oil on Masonite

24 1/4 x 36 1/4 inches (61.6 x 92.1 cm)
Framed: 25 1/4 x 36 7/8 inches (64.1 x 93.7 cm)

Josef Albers

Settled, 1954

Oil on Masonite

16 1/4 x 24 3/8 inches (41.3 x 61.9 cm)
Framed: 17 1/4 x 25 3/8 inches (43.8 x 64.5 cm)

Josef Albers

Browns, Ochre, Yellow, 1948

Oil on Masonite

18 x 24 1/2 inches (45.7 x 62.2 cm)
Framed: 19 x 26 1/2 inches (48.3 x 67.3 cm)

Josef Albers

Contented Green, 1948-1955

Oil on masonite

22 x 26 inches (55.8 x 66 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 26 5/8 inches (57.6 x 67.7 cm)

Josef Albers

2 Blues + 2 Greens, 1948

Oil on Masonite

21 1/2 x 26 inches (54.6 x 66 cm)
Framed: 22 7/8 x 26 7/8 inches (58.1 x 68.3 cm)

Josef Albers

N. M. Black-Pink, 1947

Oil on Masonite

11 5/8 x 23 1/2 inches (29.5 x 59.7 cm)
Framed: 12 3/4 x 24 5/8 inches (32.4 x 62.5 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil and pencil on blotting paper

17 1/2 x 24 1/8 inches (44.5 x 61.3 cm)
Framed: 24 3/4 x 31 3/8 inches (62.9 x 79.7 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil on blotting paper

18 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches (46 x 61.3 cm)
Framed: 25 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches (64.5 x 80 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil on blotting paper

19 1/2 x 24 1/4 inches (49.5 x 61.6 cm)
Framed: 24 5/8 x 30 1/4 inches (62.5 x 76.8 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil on blotting paper

19 1/8 x 24 1/4 inches (48.6 x 61.6 cm)
Framed: 26 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches (67 x 80 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil on blotting paper

17 3/8 x 24 inches (44.1 x 61 cm)
Framed: 19 7/8 x 26 1/2 inches (50.5 x 67.3 cm)

Josef Albers

Study for a Variant/Adobe , c. 1947

Oil and pencil on blotting paper

9 1/2 x 12 inches (24.1 x 30.5 cm)
Framed: 13 5/8 x 16 1/8 inches (34.6 x 41 cm)

Josef Albers

Familiar Front, 1948- 1952

Oil on Masonite in artist's frame

13 3/4 x 21 inches (34.9 x 53.3 cm)
Framed: 21 7/8 x 29 inches (55.6 x 73.7 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947-1952

Oil on Masonite

14 1/4 x 27 1/8 inches (36.2 x 68.9 cm)
Framed: 15 x 28 inches (38.1 x 71.1 cm)

Josef Albers

Color study for a Variant/Adobe , n.d.

Oil and pencil on blotting paper

12 x 19 inches (30.5 x 48.3 cm)
Framed: 16 1/4 x 23 1/4 inches (41.3 x 59.1 cm)

Josef Albers

Color study for a Variant/Adobe , c. 1970

Oil on blotting paper

11 1/2 x 18 inches (29.2 x 45.7 cm)
Framed: 13 3/4 x 20 3/8 inches (34.9 x 51.8 cm)

Josef Albers

Variant/Adobe, 1947

Oil and pencil on blotting paper mounted on cardboard

16 1/2 x 22 3/8 inches (41.9 x 56.8 cm)
Framed: 26 3/4 x 32 inches (68 x 81.3 cm)

Josef Albers

Study for Lozenge Horizontal, c. 1942-1946

Oil and pencil on blotting paper

19 1/8 x 24 inches (48.6 x 61 cm)
Framed: 26 3/8 x 31 1/8 inches (67 x 79.1 cm)

Josef Albers

Study for Untitled Abstraction (Painting on Victrola Gramophone Cover) , c. 1940

Oil on blotting paper

24 x 19 inches (61 x 48.3 cm)
Framed: 25 3/4 x 20 5/8 inches (65.4 x 52.4 cm)

Josef Albers

Mitla / Mitla , Mexico, 1935- 1949

Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard

10 x 16 3/8 inches (25.4 x 41.6 cm)
Framed: 14 3/8 x 20 3/4 inches (36.5 x 51.8 cm)

Josef Albers

Mitla, Mexico, c. 1956

Gelatin silver prints and postcards mounted on cardboard

8 x 12 inches (20.3 x 30.5 cm)
Framed: 12 1/4 x 16 1/4 inches (31.1 x 41.3 cm)

Josef Albers

Teotihuacan, Mexico, 1935-1939

Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard

10 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches (25.7 x 20.6 cm)
Framed: 14 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches (36.2 x 31.1 cm)

Josef Albers

Nunnery Quadrangle and Governor's Palace, Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico, 1952

Gelatin silver prints and postcard mounted on cardboard

12 x 8 inches (30.5 x 20.3 cm)
Framed: 16 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches (41.3 x 31.1 cm)

Josef Albers

‘47 , Teotihuacan, Mexico, 1935-1947

Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard

8 1/4 x 20 1/8 inches (21 x 51.1 cm)
Framed: 12 1/2 x 24 3/8 inches (31.8 x 61.9 cm)

Josef Albers

Oaxaca, Mexico, c. 1935-1967

Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard

8 1/8 x 20 inches (20.6 x 50.8 cm)
Framed: 12 3/8 x 24 3/8 inches (31.4 x 61.9 cm)

Josef Albers

Study for Graphic Tectonic , c. 1942

Ink on paper

17 x 22 inches (43.2 x 55.9 cm)
Framed: 19 1/4 x 24 1/4 inches (48.9 x 61.6 cm)

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