I went to see the Anni Albers Exhibition at the Tate Modern shortly before it closed at the end of January 2019. It was a busy exhibition and a friend who tried to go a week later was unable to get tickets as it had sold out. The audience viewing the exhibition covered a variety of ages gender and nationalities. Walking through the exhibition, it was interesting overhearing conversations about “how did she get that bit there? - Oh, I see, it’s joined here” and people counting the number of ends in a piece. Not your usual gallery conversations. They had pieces from early in her career, through the design process and items from her commercial furnishing work in a New York Hotel. Anni Albers was born in Germany and studied at the Bauhaus . She took over as the Head of the Weaving Studio in 1931. After it closed in 1932 following pressure from the Nazi party. She and her husband fled to North Carolina and they taught at Black Mountain College. Anni became the first textile designer to have a one person show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City This was the first piece to greet you on entering the exhibition and from the close up, you can see that even Anni didn’t make straight edges. The notations on the designs, which could be an artwork in themselves, were used by Anni to calculate the number and colours of warp threads they would need to set up the loom. Thee methodical and grid-like designs were painted in watercolour or gouache in four or more different tones and were exercises in colour theory. When produced as large-scale weavings, only three colours of thread would be used, red, white and black. The mid-pink and grey colours would be made using a red weft on a white warp. Developmental Rose I: Developmental Rose II: Tikal: Variations on a Theme This shows her experimentation with different traditional weaving methods and here has used the leno weave – a technique of gathering a number of vertical warp threads and crossing them around the weft to achieve a twisted form. For the weft she has used a rigid plastic rod, which gives the leno weave extra strength while adding a new texture. She wove two layers of warp at the same time, producing a double cloth. This allowed her to use leno weave across the top layer and reveal the warp threads of the bottom layer. South of the Border: Albers studied the qualities of yarns as well as different ways of working with them. Combining yarns and techniques, she created complex, multi-faceted pieces. Using a floating weft technique and brocade weaving with surface threads allowed her to make ‘pictoral’ weavings. She also began to explore knots through a friend Max Wilhelm Dehn . Sunny: Anni’s loom on which she produced some of her work. Audrey McNeill
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