Following a Thread | ourownart

top of page

Phyllis and Victor Merriam

OUROWNART

Home
Galleries
Blog
Artist Bio
Artist CV
Contact
More...

Use tab to navigate through the menu items.

Following a Thread

A Portfolio Inspired by Anni Albers' Prints and Textiles

Read Artists' Statement

As new materials became available, Albers sought to incorporate them into her practice, and she created many swatches as experiments. Eleven study swatches created in 1948 were displayed at David Zwirner. Many of these included Lurex, a laminated metallic fiber developed two years earlier. The interplay between this industrial material and the natural jute fibers created a dynamic that we wanted to experiment with ourselves by printing red “fibers” against a neutral background. For this print we overprinted three plates. - two 3D printed plates for black and red and one color block for ochre.

Throughout her career, Albers investigated the relationship between weaving and geometric abstraction. The grid structure that underlies weaving provided a platform for Albers to develop a complex abstract vocabulary. We were drawn to Albers’ use of repeating elements to construct complex abstract weavings. The inspiration for this print was Open Letter a weaving that Albers completed in 1958. The print was created using a 3D printed plate with digital chine colle on crumpled mulberry paper.

Albers explored knots as free geometrical forms both in her knot drawings of the late 1940s and later, as a printmaker, in her lithographs. In these drawings and prints the thread runs free of any grid structure and loops back on itself with many seemingly random crossings. While at Black Mountain College, Albers was exposed to formal topological principles which included knot theory. Although we don’t know if and how Albers incorporated these ideas into her practice, we wanted to relate her fascination with knots to the formal mathematical structures of underlying design by creating free form linear shapes arranged in a loose grid structure, referencing formal topographical knot tables. We made this print by overprinting two 3D printed plates and hand coloring the ground color.

Albers approach to design was to build a whole out of single elements. We were drawn to her Meander series where she used a single pattern screen, rotated and repositioned, to create evocative multilayered prints. We were also fascinated by Albers’ use of the triangle motif as a mechanism to build shapes out of the rectangular grid. This print is made using two CNC cut stencils rotated at right angles to each other and sprayed with black and silver acrylic paint on red book cloth.

Josef and Anni Albers arrived in the United States in November, 1933 following the forced closure of the Bauhaus. This print – a collection of “swatches” - reflects on the pervasive atmosphere of intolerance and repression that the Albers fled from. The base layer is a dry point print overlaid with milk which was later burnt. The next layer is a pigment offset composed from historical images of barbed wire from Nazi concentration camps. The next layers are etchings and the final “acquisition label” in an inkjet print overlaid with burnt milk.

As we explored Albers’ work, “weavings” started springing up around us. The original image for this print was a damaged chain link fence. The print is spray paint over a 3D printed mask.

We have always admired the architecture of Albers’ prints. She related weaving to architecture through the idea that a textile was a ‘pliable plane’. Like architecture, weaving by its very nature produces an underlying integral structure that is intrinsic to the overall surfaces, forms and colors that we see. This print is made using two overprinted CNC cut plates.

This plate was first printed by us in 2015 as an element of a gridded Manhattan landscape. Our journey with Anni Albers allowed us to reinterpret this image in new context. This is precisely the goal we have for our viewers. This print is made from a photopolymer plate.

bottom of page