David Zwirner is pleased to participate in TEFAF New York 2023. The booth will feature a selection of paintings by Josef Albers from the breakthrough Variant/Adobe series, a body of work that was inspired, in part, by the art, architecture, and landscapes that Albers observed during his numerous visits to Mexico and the American Southwest. Begun in 1947, while Albers was still a teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the Variant/Adobe series initiated a new phase in his work. The paintings follow a serialized format within which Albers experimented with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects. Elaborating on these visual qualities, Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, notes that, “It was Albers’s ongoing mission to contradict reality and induce disbelief. At the same time as demonstrating the mutability of colour, the Variants are sublime expressions of the poetry of painting and of the capacity of art to divert us from mundane concerns and immerse us in the beauty of what is timeless and universal.”¹

This presentation follows two recent exhibitions at David Zwirner London: a solo presentation of Albers’s work, Paintings Titled Variants, and the concurrent group presentation, Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, which featured works by Albers and several of his colleagues and students from the famed titular school.

These presentations have been organized in collaboration with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. 

¹ Nicholas Fox Weber in the didactic wall text for Paintings Titled Variants, February 2023.

Image: Josef Albers, Variant/Adobe, 1947