From 26 September 2013 to 6 January 2014, the Fondazione Stelline, in collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, will host Milan’s first ever monographic exhibition of the work of the great modernist and Bauhaus Artist, Josef Albers.

Josef Albers: Sublime Optics explores the spiritual elements in Albers’s art. Raised as a Catholic, and maintaining his religious practice lifelong, 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.

Curated and installed by Nick Murphy (Projects Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation), and based on an exhibition conceived and selected by Nicholas Fox Weber (Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation), Josef Albers: Spirituality and Rigor offers a unique perspective on the Bauhaus Master.

At the Bauhaus, where Albers was both student and teacher, from 1920-1933, Italy was an important source of inspiration. In 1934, the year following the closing of the Bauhaus, Wassily Kandinsky organized an exhibition of Albers’s prints in Milan.

This is the first time there has been an exhibition of Josef Albers’s work in Milan since that exhibition nearly 80 years ago. Albers would be thrilled to have his work shown so close to ‘The Last Supper’, a great masterpiece of the artist he so intensely respected – Leonardo.

The exhibition will include rare early drawings, stained glass assemblages, sandblasted glass constructions, and a range of pure abstract paintings.

The exhibition will present more than 70 works, from Albers’s early days as an artist and schoolteacher in Westphalia 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.

Both the Fondazione Stelline and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation are pleased to announce that this exhibition will partner with E.S.T.I.A. Cooperativa Sociale Onlus to work with inmates from local prisons at Carcere of Bollate on numerous components of the exhibition process, from the preparation and staging of the exhibition to the attendance at artistic events and stage plays.

Concurrent with this exhibition, from October 2nd to December 1st, 2013, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has collaborated with the Accademia di Brera to bring Milan an exhibition of Josef Albers’s teaching methods and students’ work, Learning to See: Josef Albers as a Teacher, from the Bauhaus to Yale.

This additional exhibition will reveal the vibrancy and extraordinary impact of Albers’s groundbreaking pedagogical methods and will feature works spanning four decades of his teaching career.

For Albers, the origin of art was “the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect.” The heightened visual attentiveness that Albers’s work creates in the visitor is the perfect tool for handling the contemporary cacophony of distractions that surrounds us.

“It is a source of great pride that we are the first to organize a solo exhibition of the works by Josef Albers after 80 years of absence from our city,” said PierCarla Delpiano, President of Fondazione Stelline. “I wish to thank the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for their collaboration”, she added. “At our Foundation we are aware of how important it was for Albers to make arts accessible to the greatest possible number of people, including those that cannot freely enjoy this privilege. This is the reason why, together with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, we started collaborating with E.S.T.I.A. Cooperativa Sociale Onlus and the prison of Bollate, with the aim of helping inmates approach arts through cultural and artistic activities. This initiative is yet further proof of the spirit of solidarity in Milan, of which the seat of our Foundation is a symbol,” she concluded.

Josef Albers was born on 19 March 1888, in Bottrop, Westphalia. After his art studies in Berlin and Munich, he enrolled in the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. In 1923, Albers was appointed instructor of the Preliminary Course, which he continued when the school moved to Dessau in 1925. It was compulsory for all new students.

In 1933, the Albers immigrated with his wife, Anni Albers, to the United States, where he was invited to make an art department in Black Mountain College, North Carolina. He and Anni Albers remained there until 1949.

In 1950, Albers started his Homage to the Square series of paintings in oil on masonite, and in the same year he accepted the appointment as Chair of the Department of Design at Yale University.

In 1963, Yale University Press published Albers’s Interaction of Color, demonstrating the principles of Albers’s endless exploration of the mutability and relativity of color and based on his renowned teaching of color, widely known as “The Color Course.”

In 1971, Josef Albers was the first living artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fondazione Stelline
Corso Magenta, 61
Milan 20123 Italy
Ph. +39 02 45462411
info@stelline.it
www.stelline.it

Opening hours
Tuesday - Sunday
From 10am to 8pm

Admission
Full price 8.00€
Reduced 6.00€
Students 3.00€