UNTIL SUNDAY 19/6
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
This is one of the great exhibitions that will come to Valencia this year, without a doubt. The one of Anni and Josef Albers at the IVAM is the double retrospective of two essential creators of the 20th century who influenced each other and allowed themselves to be soaked by the environment, for life, when designing his paintings, photographs, fabrics, drawings, recorded, furniture and glass pieces. In the impoverished Germany of the twenties, Josef rescued materials from the garbage of Weimar to create wonderful works with fragments of glass that were not very well received at the beginning at the Bauhaus where he was studying at the time. At the famous school he met Annelise Fleischmann, another student who had enrolled without too much enthusiasm in the textile workshop to end up taking this discipline out of the drawer of applied arts and spreading it to the wind as Art major. He also drank from his closest surroundings, and other distant and ancient traditions such as pre-Columbian. From deep admiration, controversial issue of cultural appropriation. In any case, the two students would end up getting married and rising to the level of teachers within the school, where they would teach that art is not an object, but an experience.
The exhibition Anni and Josef Albers. Art and life covers all the life and professional stages of this marriage that laid the foundations of modern art as it passed through the two Bauhaus headquarters (Weimar i Dessau) and Black Mountain College near the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where nature surrounded everything. Josef designed simple furniture, functional and harmonious with good materials, participated in the creation of a typographic character specific to the Bauhaus (Universal), interested in photography, he collage and the photomontages, and played with the square and the perception of colors in relation to their context. Anni threw herself into creating jewelry fascinated by the jewelry of pre-Columbian civilizations, experimented with the nucs (Joseph too), she fell in surrender before the engraving, and drank from Peruvian looms that served to transmit knowledge among an illiterate community. He 1961 created six hand-woven panels in plain colors for an Israelite congregation in Rhode Island that are on display for the first time, to the VAT, in its chronological and cross-section through the life and work of these two giants of modern art. S.M.
