NEW YORK, NY.- David Zwirner announced its exclusive worldwide representation of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation is devoted to preserving and promoting the achievements of both Josef and Anni Albers, and the aesthetic and philosophical principles by which they lived. The Foundation is based in Bethany, Connecticut, near New Haven, where it maintains a central research and archival facility, as well as residence studios for visiting artists.
David Zwirner will be The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation’s exclusive commercial gallery. In this role, David Zwirner will promote the legacies of both Josef and Anni Albers through curated exhibitions at its New York and London gallery spaces; the development of new scholarship on the artists’ work through publications and international exhibitions; and through the sale of artworks consigned to the gallery by the Foundation.
The gallery will present an exhibition of Josef Albers’s work in its 537 West 20th Street location in New York in November 2016 that will explore the relationship between his Homage to the Square paintings and the monochrome.
As stated by David Zwirner, “Josef and Anni Albers are among the most significant artistic figures of their time. From their grounding in the Bauhaus to their ongoing influence on contemporary art, their pioneering work not only bridges European and American modernism, but also continues to be relevant today. It is a great honor that the Foundation has entrusted us to help further their important legacies.”
Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation states, “I considered my recent search for the ideal art gallery to represent The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation worldwide to be one of the most significant, possibly daunting, tasks of my forty years at the helm of this wonderful organization. What I thought would be difficult has proved to be a source of enormous pleasure. In David Zwirner, David Leiber, and others on the team of this wonderful art gallery, I have found people with the integrity, energy, passion for art, and human values that were dear to Josef and Anni alike. In 1971, the Alberses established, as the goal of our Foundation, ‘the revelation and evocation of vision through art.’ With our desire to perpetuate those intentions in places ranging from some of the poorest villages in rural Africa to the most sophisticated museums in great metropolises, we believe that David Zwirner and the gallery embody our interests with aplomb, professionalism, wisdom, and kindness.”
Josef and Anni Albers met in 1922 at the Bauhaus, then located in Weimar, Germany, and were married in 1925, the same year that the school relocated to Dessau. Following the closure of the Bauhaus, when its remaining faculty members refused to re-open the school in compliance with the Third Reich, the couple emigrated to the United States in 1933, first settling in North Carolina, where they taught and helped to develop the design curriculum at Black Mountain College, at that time a noted site of avant-garde activity. After becoming U.S. citizens in 1939, Josef and Anni Albers traveled extensively together, spending time, in particular, in Mexico and the American Southwest. They remained at Black Mountain until 1950, when they moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef Albers was invited to direct the department of design at Yale University School of Art.
