Josef Albers' Expansive ‘Formulation: Articulation’ Is on View at David Zwirner

Josef Albers‘ color studies take center stage in a new solo exhibition at David Zwirner. The online show emphasizes the German-American artist and educator’s print portfolio, Formulation: Articulation, which is mapped across 127 screenprints printed on 66 sheets of folded wove paper, which explore a number of pivotal periods within Albers’ career — from his early days at the Bauhaus and the woodcuts he’d tinker with at Black Mountain College to the Variant/Adobe and Homage to the Square artworks that he’s arguably most remembered for today.

Albers, who passed away in 1976, age 88, was constantly experimenting well into old age. Printmaking became a quick and efficient way for him “to explore new methods….,” wrote Brenda Danilowitz, art historian and chief curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. “There is also frequently a sense of adventure and a whimsicality, a surprise at what the process yields.”

Initially started in the 1950s, Homage to the Square was first conceived using a palette knife directly to the canvas. By limiting himself to the aesthetic confines of a square, Albers, over the next 25 years, would use color to produce optical effects — that were not so much as to deceive the viewer — but to challenge their perception and teach the mechanics of vision.

“It is only after a close study of all [Albers's] works… that you can both understand his philosophy of art and appreciate that Formulation: Articulation is Albers’s summa,” wrote publisher Norman Ives and Sewell Sillman in a preface to the portfolio. “It expresses, with breathtaking inventiveness and vigour for a man in his eighties, the thoughts and ideas of a lifetime, and the theoretical application of the intensely practical views he had set out over a century of teaching.”

Formulation: Articulation is on view online at David Zwirner.