DESCRIPTION

“Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art,” Josef Albers wrote to his former Bauhaus colleague Vasily Kandinsky in 1936. Josef Albers in Mexico reveals the profound link between the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica and Albers’ abstract works on canvas and paper. With his wife, the artist Anni Albers, Albers toured pre-Columbian archeological sites and monuments during his 12 or more trips to Mexico and other Latin American countries between 1935 and 1968. On each visit, Albers took black-and-white photographs of pyramids, shrines, sanctuaries and landscapes, which he later assembled into rarely seen photo collages. The resulting works demonstrate Albers’ continued formal experimentation with geometry, this time accentuating a pre-Columbian aesthetic.

Josef Albers in Mexico brings together photographs, photo collages, prints and significant paintings from the Variants/Adobe (1946–66) and Homage to the Square (1950–76) series from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation. Two scholarly essays, an illustrated map and vivid color reproductions of paintings and works on paper illuminate this little-known period in the influential artist’s practice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lauren Hinkson is Associate Curator of Collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Hinkson conducts permanent collection research with a focus on postwar, contemporary, and time-based media art. Hinkson manages the Guggenheim’s acquisition program and is one of the organizing curators for the museum’s Young Collectors Council, which acquires the work of emerging artists for the permanent collection. She lectures and publishes on these topics. Hinkson graduated from Brown University with a BA in the History of Art and Architecture.

Joaquín Barríendos is a professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He teaches graduate courses focused on visual culture and Latin American art, with an emphasis on social movements, artists networks, geopolitics of art, visual translatability, conceptual practices, and institutional critique.

REVIEWS

Wall Street Journal - Richard Woodward

the architecture and sculpture of ancient Mexico were vital to [Albers'] art, not only as a database of motifs for his paintings but also as a kind of secular church where his faith in abstract art for the modern age was renewed.

The New York Times - Roberta Smith

"Josef Albers in Mexico” has an energetic syncopation generated by the paintings’ singing colors, which alternate with the silvery sepia of the photographs.

Hyperallergic - Dennis Zhou

A necessary corrective to Albers’s reputation as more pedagogue than painter and the misconception that abstraction can ever be free of outside influence.