Josef Albers: Sublime Optics
26/09/2013 – 06/01/2014
JOSEF ALBERS: SUBLIME OPTICS
First monographic exhibition in Milan, realized from Fondazione Stelline
in collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, it marks the
return to Milan of Josef Albers (Bottrop, March 19th, 1888 – New Haven, March 26th, 1976) after almost eighty years from his exhibition organized
by Wassily Kandinsky.
Raised as a Catholic, Albers incorporated traditional imagery in a lot of his work, and, even when he did not, regarded transformation of color and line as spiritual, even mystical, events.
The exhibition present more than seventy works – including rare early drawings, stained glass assemblages, sandblasted glass constructions,
and a range of pure abstract paintings – from Albers’s early days as an
artist to the final years of his life: from his very first known drawing to
his very last Homage to the Square. Underlying all these works is Albers’s reverence for clear and honest thinking, and his firm belief that devotion
to craftsmanship and truthfulness can transform the everyday
miraculously.
In 1971, Josef Albers was the first living artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Concurrent with this exhibition, from the October 2nd to the December 2013 1st, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has
collaborated with the Accademia di Brera to bring Milan an exhibition on Josef Albers’s teaching methods and students’ work:
“Learning to See: Josef Albers as a Teacher, from the Bauhaus to Yale”.
Albers always declared the need to make arts accessible to the greatest possible number of people, including those that cannot
freely enjoy this privilege. Conforming to that, together with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, we started collaborating
with the II Prison of Milan-Bollate and with the cooperative E.S.T.I.A. with the aim of helping inmates approach arts through
cultural and artistic activities, open to the public as well.
JOSEF ALBERS. Sublime Optics
26.09.2013 – 06.01.2014
Hours | Tuesday – Sunday, 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. (closed Mondays)
