Hello everyone,
So this week I went on a trip to the Tate Modern to see the Anni Albers exhibition and I thought I would share this on my blog.
Anni Albers was an artist, designer, teacher, writer and weaver who was part of the abstract and Bauhaus art movements. Ablers was born in 1899, to a middle-class family and dies in 1994. Anni Ablers attended the Bauhaus and this was where she was first introduced to hand weaving and where she met her future husband. Anni Albers emigrated to the us, in 1933 as the Nazis where taking over the Bauhaus, where both her and her husband became teachers at the experimental black mountain college in North Carolina. She later moved to new heaven, Connecticut, in 1950 as Josef Albers got an appointment at Yale university.
The Bauhaus art school opened in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by a group of artists. There idea was to create a new way of training people in art to fit their modern life after the first world war. At the Bauhaus school all of the artists trained together, experimenting and testing things out. The students took a one-year course where they tried out all the different types of art and then they specialised in one type of art, everything they made was then sold. This really focused on had making things, making them individual and making them functional. This movement was mainly inspired by the English arts and crafts movement and construction. The Bauhaus school shut down in 1933 when the Nazis where starting to take over Germany and they were anti Bauhaus, they changed the employment rules to stop the Jews getting jobs.
At the exhibition showing Anni Alberts work it showed many different aspects of her work and the different styles and techniques that she experimented with throughout her life. The majority of her work in the exhibition was her weaving and her painted plans of the weavings. I found her work really interesting how she planned out her work using different medias, so she knew what she wanted to do when she was weaving.
This piece is untitled and was made in in 1941, and is made out of rayon, linen, cotton, wool and jute. This piece is thought to be one of Albers first pieces of weaving that she produced in pictorial form, so it is framed and displayed on the wall. I really like how she used a wide edged plain weave which acts like a border to the grid design in the centre, I think this really makes the design stand out and brings attention into it. I like the grid pattern that she has created inside the frame, incorporating different types of weaves to make different effects and textures. It is really interesting that you can see the warp and waft threads in the design which adds a bit of detail.
This piece is called intersecting, in 1962, and is made out of cotton and rayon. In this pictorial piece of weaving Anni Albers has only used four coloured threads. She created a plan background which she then worked on top of creating her design. Albers used a floating weft to block additional threads that meander and cross over other threads. Some of the threads barely stand out against each other but then at other points they really contrast, because of the different weave. I really like how there is a flowing thread going down the piece, adds another element of design and detail into the weaving.
This piece at the Anni Albers exhibition was made in collaboration with the weaver Inge Brouard Brown and the two rugs are called Vicara rug one and two, which were made in 1959.to make these rugs they used Vicara, wool and cotton. Vicara was a new fibre that they were designing which was made out of corn protein and was named after the manufacturer =, the Virginia Caroline chemical corporation of Richmond. This new fibre was good as it had lots of qualities that incorporated the quality of other fibres, it was as warm as wool, soft as silk and more durable then cotton, this made it ideal for making rugs as it would wear well. Anni Albers created the triangle pattern that she designed using a pile weave, which created tufts which was similar to what was used in carpets or rugs. I really like how the pile weave creates a different texture which stands out against the rest of the weave and having the triangles being the only things in this weave makes them really stand out and lets you see the pattern more than you would if they were in the same type of weave.
This piece was actually not made by Anni Albers but by Lena Meyer-Bergner and was a water colour plan for a weaving. Meyer-Bergner was a fellow student with Anni Albers at the Bauhaus art school, she produced many designs for weavings, like the designs above. These designs where made for a weaving for a carpet, but it is unknown if the carpets where actually made. I really like how Lena Mayer-Bergner incorporated her distinctive colour combinations with typical linear grid pattern which was a characteristic of Bauhaus art at the time. I think that the bright orange colour really stands out against the other more neutral toned colours this makes it look like the blocks of colours are being layered in different blocks which I really like.
This piece is quite different to Anni Albers previous work that was in the exhibition. This piece is called drawing for a knot, using pencil onto tracing paper in 1947. This was different to her past work as she started to look at knots, this could have been influenced by the German mathematician and knot theorist Max Wilhelm Dehn. By looking at knots she was looking at different ways of looping threads. I really like the thin line that she has created using a pencil and makes a two media affect using the pencil.
I found all of the work at the exhibition really inspiring and interesting to learn and look at different ways of using weaving to create art. I think after going to this exhibition I am going to look more into weaving and the different ways I could use weaving in my work. Here is some more images that I took at the exhibition:
I hope you have enjoyed looking at what I have been up to and thank you for reading.
Amy xxx
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