Collection: Josef Albers

Josef Albers (1888, Bottrop — 1976, New Haven) was a German-born artist, educator and theorist whose work and teaching shaped the course of twentieth-century art and design on both sides of the Atlantic. Trained at the Bauhaus, where he later taught, Albers emigrated to the United States in 1933 following the school’s closure by the Nazis. He taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina until 1949, and subsequently at Yale University, where he chaired the Department of Design until 1960.

Albers’s practice was grounded in a sustained investigation of colour perception and optical interaction. His most celebrated series, Homage to the Square, begun in 1950 and continued until his death in 1976, comprises hundreds of paintings in which nested squares of varying colour relationships are used to demonstrate the relativity of colour — the way in which the same colour appears different depending on its context. His theoretical text Interaction of Color (Yale University Press, 1963) remains one of the most influential works on colour theory in the history of art education.

Albers exhibited internationally throughout his career and his work is held in major public collections worldwide. David Zwirner began representing the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 2016, presenting Sunny Side Up at its London gallery in January 2017 — the first of a series of London exhibitions devoted to his work. Exhibition invitations, catalogues and printed matter produced in connection with his practice document one of the most rigorous and systematically pursued careers in postwar art.