The gallery announcements for Frieze and Frieze Masters have been rolling in these last few weeks. Alan Cristea is building his Frieze Masters booth around Josef Albers’s prints:
The Alan Cristea Gallery, the sole worldwide representative for the prints from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, will present both rare and well known prints dating from 1916 – 1976, some of which have never been offered for sale before, and one unique work from his seminal series, Homage to the Square. This retrospective highlights Albers innovations in the field of printmaking, and the artist’s continued far reaching influence on art today.
Josef Albers, a founding member of the Bauhaus, pioneered print making in the last century, making use of numerous media, including etching, engraving, woodcut, lithography and screen-printing. Albers earliest prints were made whilst studying in Essen, Germany, from 1916 – 1919.
The Alan Cristea Gallery will be exhibiting a selection of these including, In the Cathedral: Small Middle Nave (1916), Rabbit (half to the right) (1916) and Sandgrube III (1916). Influenced by the style of contemporary German Expressionism, these prints reveal an early abandonment of representation in favour of abstraction. Sandgrube III, one in series of sandpits which depict different yet related views of the same subject, highlights Albers’s early interest in a serial approach to his art which he later develops in 1949 when he begins work on his Homage to the Square experiments.
