“Tate Modern presents the UK’s first major retrospective of the work of Anni Albers (1899–1994). This exhibition brings together her most important works from major collections in the US and Europe, many of which will be shown in the UK for the first time, to highlight Albers’s significance as an artist. Opening ahead of the centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019, it is long overdue recognition of Albers’s pivotal contribution to modern art and design, and part of Tate Modern’s wider commitment to showing artists working in textiles.

Anni Albers combined the ancient craft of hand-weaving with the language of modern art, finding within the medium many possibilities for the expression of modern life. Featuring over 350 objects including beautiful small-scale studies, large wall-hangings, jewellery made from everyday items, and textiles designed for mass production, this exhibition explores the many aspects of Albers’s practice – such as the intersection between art and craft; hand-weaving and machine production; ancient and modern. Significant weavings such as Ancient Writing 1936 and Six Prayers 1966-67 – Albers’s moving memorial commemorating the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York – are shown in this country for the first time. The artist’s lesser-known commissioned works exploring the relationship between textiles and architecture are also highlighted, including Albers’s designs for a large wall-hanging at the iconic modernist Camino Real hotel in Mexico City in 1968. The exhibition design itself takes inspiration from the artist’s own writings, such as her seminal essay ‘The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture’, 1957, in which Albers advocates ‘a new understanding between the architect and the inventive weaver’.” — Tate Modern

Anni Albers
. Wall Hanging, 1926. 
Mercerized cotton, silk, 
2032 x 1207 mm. 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Everfast Fabrics Inc. and Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1969 © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Anni Albers. 
Ancient Writing, 1936. 
Cotton and rayon, 
1505 x 1118 mm. 
Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of John Young © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London
. Photo: Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource NY/Scala, Florence

Anni Albers. 
With Verticals, 1946. 
Red cotton and linen
, 1549 x 1181 mm. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany CT © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. 
Photograph by Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art

Anni Albers. 
Open Letter, 1958. 
Cotton, 
57.8 x 60 cm. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany CT 
© 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. 
Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art

Anni Albers. 
Intersecting, 1962. 
Pictorial weaving, cotton and rayon, 
400 x 419 mm
. Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop
© 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Anni Albers. Rug, 1959. Wool hand woven, 1220 x 1650 mm. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
© 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Anni Albers. 
Six Prayers, 1966-1967. 
Cotton/linen, bast/silver, Lurex
, 1861 x 2972 mm. 
The Jewish Museum, New York, Gift of the Albert A. List Family, JM

Anni Albers
. Epitaph, 1968. Pictorial weaving, 1498 x 584 mm. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany CT
© 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937

Anni Albers is organised by Tate Modern and Stiftung Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. It is curated by Ann Coxon, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, Professor Briony Fer, University College London with Maria Müller-Schareck, Curator, Stiftung Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen assisted by Priyesh Mistry, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern and Linda Walther, Assistant Curator, Stiftung Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Images courtesy Tate Modern.