Anni Albers

Abstract

The Anni Albers exhibition, unusually for Tate Modern, London, opens with a twelve-shaft Counter March handloom comparable to the one that Albers used in her studio in Connecticut, United States. It ends with a film showing her reassembled loom in action. This bookending of the show with the hand weaver’s instrument emphasizes the traceability of material, and the possibilities of its making with various stages of change. Albers talks in her writing about the material possibilities of speculation, and the slow physical realization of work. She describes herself as being led by thread, “an active process, ... a listening for the dictation of the material and a taking in of the laws of harmony.” For Albers, who described weaving as “the event of the thread,” the actions of weaving set ideas in motion as a way of questioning and conceptualizing our being present in the world. This major exhibition at Tate Modern is without question the event both of the thread and of Albers, compelling in its color, intensely realized through complex weave structures, multiple grids, meandering lines and layered surfaces. In what is remarkably the first major showing of Albers’ work, the exhibition draws attention to the overlooked contribution of women artists and of applied artistic practice, both historically relegated as subsidiary to the fine arts. It reclaims the importance of women’s practice through this pioneering artist’s work—who, as a woman, was directed into weave at the Bauhaus—but also in the curatorial team: Ann