DUSSELDORF.- Anni Albers (1899–1994) was an extraordinarily versatile artist who established handloom weaving as a fully-fledged art form. In the process, she revolutionized an ancient cultural technology, amalgamating it with modern artistic practices. She spent her formative years of study at the Bauhaus School in Weimar and Dessau, where she cultivated close exchanges with teachers and fellow students alike. In 1933, after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, she emigrated with her husband Josef Albers to the United States, where the two taught at the legendary Black Mountain College.

In this wide-ranging retrospective, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents the multifaceted oeuvre of the artist, craftsmen, designer, pedagogue, and author Anni Albers. On view at the K20 Grabbeplatz from June 9 until September 9, 2018 are more than 300 loans from European and US-American museum collections, among them selected examples of her artistic production, the "Pictorial Weavings," drawings, and print works, but also fabric patterns, textiles for manufacturers, along with numerous documents that serve to visualize her artistic and intellectual cosmos. The Düsseldorf presentation is the first retrospective exhibition devoted to Anni Albers in almost two decades.

Born in Berlin in 1899 to prosperous middle-class parents, Anneliese Fleischmann resolved early on to devote her life to art, and studied beginning in 1922 at the innovative Bauhaus school in Weimar, where she attended preliminary courses taught by Georg Muche and Johannes Itten. The Bauhaus, simultaneously an art academy and a school for applied arts, aspired toward the professionalization of art, handcraft production, and design, as well as the close collaboration between artists and master craftsmen: according to Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, the aim of training at the school was to "abolish the separating distinction between free and applied art and to the allow interaction between the two realms to become fruitful."

Like many of her fellow female students, Anni Albers joined the textile workshop. Although she began weaving to some extent in response to an absence of alternatives, she soon became an important member of the workshop, where hand weaving played an important role. Later on, after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, the development of materials for mechanical production shifted into the foreground. After the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States together with her husband, the artist Josef Albers, in order to teach at the recently-founded experimental Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. At this progressive educational institution, where art, dance, and music had their places alongside sociology, philosophy, economics, and mathematics, the couple spent a number of productive years. Anni Albers set up a weaving workshop, and proved an inspiring teacher. It was here, in the late 1930s, that she created the first pictorial weavings, inspired by the couple's travels to Mexico. The greater portion of her woven images, created exclusively for visual contemplation, were produced near New Haven in Connecticut, where Albers lived from 1950 until her death in 1994.

In the late 1960s, when hand weaving became too difficult for her, Anni Albers discovered a new medium for her work in print techniques. Through them, she was able to build upon her many-faceted explorations of texture, color, and surface qualities, while investigating familiar phenomena such as knots, pattern formation, and color mixture using new resources. This new approach is impressively displayed in the fascinating variations on the triangle, in which embossing techniques play a role alongside the confident play of colors. At the same time, she worked on a book which was published in 1965 under the title On Weaving, where she presents and discusses "textile fundamentals and methods." The ten texts, accompanied by a lengthy sequence of illustrations, clarify in striking ways the extraordinary complexity of this primordial technique, in which hand, eye, mechanical device, and the conceiving mind must cooperate seamlessly in order to conceive novel forms and qualities that reflect the spirit of the times.

Coming to light in this wide-ranging retrospective at the K20 – which was organized in cooperation with the Tate Modern in London – is the intricate creative cosmos of Anni Albers. She was profoundly convinced that like every other handicraft, weaving "could result in the production of useful objects, or else be raised to the level of fine art." Presented alongside early wall hangings (Wall Hanging, 1924) and the so-called Pictorial Weavings of the 1950s (With Verticals, 1946, Black-White-Gold I, 1950, Thickly Settled, 1957) are room dividers for residences and fabrics for mechanical production, chromatically intense or structured prints (the sequence Mountainous I – VI, 1978), jewelry constructed from common everyday materials, pedagogical studies, as well as textile patterns, all of which document Albers insatiable curiosity about new fibers and weaving structures. 1966-67, for a commission from the Jewish Museum in New York, Anni Albers created Six Prayers, a memorial to the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. This imposing yet at the same time extraordinarily delicate work will be on view from July 31st until September 9th.

Configured at the center of the exhibition, and forming a kind of centerpiece, is an ensemble of artworks, photographs, books, texts, and other materials which influenced Albers and inspired her conception of woven thread as a kind of universal language, among them Pre-Colombian and Peruvian textiles from the private collection assembled by Annie and Josef Albers during their numerous trips to Mexico and Peru. The astonishingly harmonious character of this ensemble of works elucidates the manysided quality of Albers' contribution to modernism, at the same time providing at least a sketch of her sustained influence on the art and design of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The exhibition was organized by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and the Tate Modern, London.