Leonard’s fascination with texture and structure is evident in her up-close photographs of textiles found in her own domestic space, including the familiar loop pile of mass-produced terrycloth, made strange here by its translation into a flat black-and-white picture. The pieces are delicate and also strikingly graphic, with irregular yet assured dot-filled squares filling their surfaces. Apfelbaum, for instance, is represented by two wall hangings from 2015 made of thin silk rayon velvet whose checkered motifs are drawn from a mid-century reference book of weaving patterns. Photo: Charles Benton.Ĭooke has chosen a handful of thoughtful examples for each of the five artists. Polly Apfelbaum, Grey Scale 2, 2015. Marker on silk rayon velvet, 56 × 38 inches. Cooke elucidates how for Albers, as well as for these artists, weaving is less a handicraft than a maneuver (defined by the curator as a “directed, or planned and controlled, set of decisions”) that can be tactically deployed in the service of industrial production as well as fine art. Taking as its point of departure her book On Weaving, first published in 1965 and still the high-water mark for rigorous description around the horizontal/vertical interface, Cooke’s exhibition brings together five artists from the US and Germany-Polly Apfelbaum, Sarah Charlesworth, Zoe Leonard, Ed Rossbach, and Rosemarie Trockel-to reveal facets of Albers that go beyond the simplistic understanding of her as a craftswoman. Photo: Charles Benton.Ī counterpoint to Albers’s recent monographic presentations, Maneuver highlights artists whose works from the last fifty-odd years fall in the wake of, and are very much in conversation with, the multivalent legacy of Albers (1899–1994) as a writer and as a maker. Maneuver, a spare and elegant group show curated by Lynne Cooke at the Artist’s Institute, extends that reassessment, revealing how the influential Bauhaus artist, weaver, author, printmaker, and textile theorist has also been a productive springboard for a range of contemporary practices. Not just a major-museum-and-hot-market moment (though it is that, too): these necessary reevaluations help place her at the center of twentieth-century modernism. Judging by her well-received fall 2018 retrospective at Tate Modern and her recent 2019 solo show at David Zwirner-the first since her estate began to be represented by the powerhouse gallery-it is clear that Anni Albers is having a moment. Maneuver, curated by Lynne Cooke, the Artist’s Institute, 132 East Sixty-Fifth Street, New York City, through December 14, 2019 © 2019 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society. Screenprinted textile samples stapled to paper, 11 3/4 × 8 1/4 inches. Anni Albers, Eclat printed textile samples for Knoll Textiles and notes, ca.
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