Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.
Anni Albers, 1968

Although the name Anni Albers immediately brings to mind the artist’s well-known practice of weaving, this exhibition aims to shift the emphasis away from the act of weaving and toward textile design, materials, and Albers’s collaborations with architects and other fabricators. The exhibition title takes its inspiration from Albers’s 1946 essay “Constructing Textiles,” her response to the increasing industrial ­production of textiles that questioned the Bauhaus definition of handweaving as a structural process.

Anni Albers’s consideration of weaving as the first technology and its proximity to architecture is rooted in nineteenth-century German architect and art theoretician Gottfried Semper’s idea of textile as the origin of a wall. Semper described textile art as Urkunst—primordial art—and considered it as the very beginning of architecture, since textiles had provided shelter and divided spaces long before buildings were constructed of more permanent materials.

The exhibition is loosely structured in six chapters which focus on Anni Albers’s education at the Bauhaus; the lessons she learned from pre-Columbian weavers; the role of geometry; experiments with new materials; the design of functional materials; and the relationship between weaving and writing. Seven projects are at the core of the exhibition, highlighting Albers’s collaborations with architects and her invention of new fabrics in response to specific architectural spaces.

In all her endeavours, Anni Albers pursued the goal of understanding weaving as a construction with threads, as a constantly evolving experiment with new materials, and as an integral part of architecture. She regarded her work as an adventure and argued in her writing for designers to embrace “the power of creation.” It is our hope that this exhibition will continue to inform, ignite, and provoke creative minds and inspire thoughtful and innovative production in art, design, and architecture.

The exhibition is organized by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT, in collaboration with Belvedere, Vienna.