David Zwirner is pleased to present Josef Albers: Duets, on view at the gallery’s Paris location. The exhibition features significant paintings and works on paper from the 1930s through the 1970s in which two related forms are played against one another. Albers was fascinated by such dualities. He guides us to recognize first that either two disparate paintings or two disparate elements within a single painting are in many ways the same but also vary from one another because of shifts in color or their internal structures.
Josef Albers: Duets is organized in collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation. It is the first solo show of the artist’s work in Paris since the widely acclaimed Josef and Anni Albers: Art and Life, which was held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 2021–2022, and the permanent installation of a gift of more than fifty works from the Albers Foundation to the museum.
Paintings and works on paper from Albers’s groundbreaking series Homage to the Square (1950–1976), in which he experimented with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects set in precise formats, are featured. These include Study for Homage to the Square: Starting Anew (1964) and Study for Homage to the Square (1968), whose shared palette of green and grays demonstrate how Albers returned to resonant colorways over the years, here in large 40-by-40-inch scale. Nearby, Study to Homage for the Square: Budding (1958) and Study for Homage to the Square: Spring Out (1962), apply earthen greens and browns that allude to the natural world and the changing seasons. Others, such as two grayscale oil studies for Albers’s first Homage to the Square from 1950, further highlight how compositional placement defines the ultimate perception of color.
The exhibition further highlights Albers’s work in black, white, and gray. Early series by the artist, including a significant glass work and gouaches from the series Treble Clefs (1932–1935), each depict the musical notation in grayscale tones. These important works bridge the period from Albers’s departure from the Bauhaus to his arrival in the United States. They will be complemented by key pairings of Homage to the Square paintings, including the aforementioned early studies, as well as a complete portfolio of Gray Instrumentation I (1974), comprising a suite of Homage to the Square screenprints published by Tyler Graphics in Bedford Village, New York.
On view are selections of Albers’s series of Variants (begun in 1947), also called Adobes because of their relationship to the architecture that riveted the artist in Mexico and the American Southwest, with one of its hallmarks being the presence of two entrances, inviting the viewer to experience the same structure following two different but related routes. Albers was very aware that these alternate visual experiences were analogous to what happens in life itself when one considers or takes different paths, emotionally or physically, rather than adhering to the idea that there is only a single way to do something.
© Text and Photo Courtesy of David Zwirner
