Anni Albers

After 1963, Anni Albers increasingly turns to printmaking and away from weaving – no doubt also because she is no longer physically up to the strenuous work at the loom. Just as adventurous as she was in weaving, she is equally experimental, curious and skilled in her handling of printmaking techniques and materials. In 1963, Albers accompanies her husband to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, where she is encouraged to try her hand at printmaking herself.

Her first works feature knots and meandering lines, as if the threads of her woven pieces were now shifting from material to motif. It is only later that Albers begins working in geometric abstraction, focusing on geometric bands or meanders and triangles. In an interview, Albers mentions:

“I was trying to build something out of dots, out of lines, out of a structure built of those elemental elements and not the transposition into an idea, into a literary idea.”

This work is part of a series of etchings and aquatints from 1976. The composition here is based entirely on triangles in three variations: most striking are the triangles in deep black; alongside them are triangles made up of countless dots without any outline; and finally, triangles and rhombi emerge from the spaces between the black and dotted triangles. A key inspiration for Anni Albers’s triangular structures is the architecture of the Zapotecs, which she saw in Mitla, Mexico. A simple structure thus becomes complex, diverse and engaging. The connection to her large wall hanging for the Camino Real and to works such as Vicara Rug, which also use triangles as a structuring element, is unmistakable.