Josef Albers – first solo exhibition in Norway

Following the exhibition Human Space Machine: Stage Experiments at the Bauhaus, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK)  in Norway is proud to present an exhibition featuring the work of Josef Albers, one of the most influential Bauhaus artists.

Welcome to the press preview of Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect at HOK on Thursday 16 September at 10 am.

HOK Director, Tone Hansen, and cultural historian and Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Nicholas Fox Weber, will be present at the press preview.

About the exhibition

Josef Albers: Minimal Means, Maximum Effect is the first solo exhibition in Norway of German-born artist and educator Josef Albers (1888-1976). Known primarily as an abstract painter, color theorist and art lecturer, Josef Albers was also a gifted designer, photographer, typographer, graphic artist and poet.

The exhibition at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter presents a number of Albers’s most important works. Spanning Albers’ production over sixty years, the works on view highlight the dexterity of Albers’ practice and not least his commitment to creating complex perceptual and spatial experiences through deceivingly simple compositions of colors and lines. The range of works presented in the exhibition comprises design objects, glass works and photographs from his period at the influential design school the Bauhaus in the 1920s, to his painting and graphic works produced during his time in America, to which he immigrated in 1933 following Hitler’s rise to power and the resulting closure of the Bauhaus.

Albers’ important painting series, Homage to the Square, is a central focus of the exhibition, along with the painting studies he produced while making them. Significantly Albers’ development as an artist paralleled his personal journey as an educator, first at the Bauhaus and later at Black Mountain College, a progressive school in North Carolina, where he taught till 1949 before moving to Yale University in Connecticut, where he served as the Head of the Design Department until 1958.

 “The exhibition provides an important insight into an artist, who has influenced an entire generation of American and European painters. Through his methodical investigation of colour he has been significant for Norwegian painters such as Irma Salo Jæger, and his theories are still influential in art education in Norway, ” says Tone Hansen, director at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter.

The exhibition opens on 18 September, and will be open to the public from 19 September through to 14 December 2014 at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter.

The exhibition has been curated by HOK in collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, CT and the Fundación Juan March in Madrid. The publication Josef Albers: No tricks, no twinkling of the eyes that accompanies the exhibition has been produced by HOK and is published by Walther König Verlag.

Contact

Tone Hansen, Director, HOK

E-mail: th@hok.no

Telephone: 91769664

High resolution images can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Josef Albers (1888, Germany – 1976, USA) is one of the most influential artists and educators of the twentieth century. Albers arrived at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920 as a student, and became a teacher on the school’s foundation course in 1923. At the Bauhaus, Albers met the artist Anni Fleischmann, and they married in 1925. That same year, Albers was made a Bauhaus professor and moved with the school to Dessau. When the Nazis closed the school in 1933, Albers and his wife left Germany for the US, and Albers took up a teaching post at the newly established Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1950, the couple moved to New Haven, where they would remain for the rest of their lives, and Albers became head of the department of design at Yale University. In 1963, he published his now famous book Interaction of Color. Since 1971, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has managed the two artists’ estate.

Nicholas Fox Weber is a cultural historian and Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. He has written extensively on both artists, and has curated a several major exhibitions dedicated to their work. Weber was educated at Columbia College and Yale University. He has published a number of important books, including Patron Saints, The Art of Babar, The Drawings of Josef Albers, The Clarks of Cooperstown, Balthus: A Biography, Le Corbusier: A Life, and The Bauhaus Group. Weber is currently working on a biography of Piet Mondrian to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.