The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - "The Sum of the Parts. The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers" Exhibition

The Sum of the Parts

The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Until 29 August 2025

Josef Albers 

Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962 

The complete portfolio of 10 screenprints 

Paper and Image each: 43 x 43 cm (each) 

Edition of 250 

Photo courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents the first exhibition dedicated to all of the print portfolios made by Josef Albers.

The Sum of the Parts: The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers, features eighteen portfolios using lithography, silkscreen, inkless intaglio and embossing. The portfolios made over a period of 14 years which are increasingly rare to see in their complete form, is each a powerful demonstration of how markedly original Albers was in his understanding of colour and line.

Josef Albers (1888 - 1976), was one of the greatest abstract artists of the twentieth century, creating seminal works in painting, stained glass, and furniture.  He was also a dedicated printmaker who produced work in a variety of print techniques right up until his death in 1976. His complete graphic oeuvre comprises some 350 editions. In printmaking, Josef Albers found the perfect vehicle with which to realize the full array of his imagery and to develop his theoretical approach to colour.

Josef Albers made his first suite in 1962, Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers. It was the first time he explored his Homage to the Square painted imagery in a series of prints. Using an array of solid, unmodulated colours, the viewer is invited to perceive shifting depth and change of tone in multiple works at once.

Josef Albers went on to produce more sets, which each take a particular compositional theme, which is then explored through variations of tone, colour and line. Midnight and Noon, 1964, brings together two opposing colour sets, printed in different densities, in a single portfolio. In Soft Edge-Hard Edge, 1965, edges define forms but then begin to disappear before your eyes, creating a conflict between what is precise and what is an illusion. White Line Squares, 1966, features colours registered side by side, delineated by a single white line. The addition of this precise line creates the appearance of four colours, although only three inks are used. 

In the early 1970s Josef Albers spent almost two years making Formulation: Articulation, 1972, a set of two boxed portfolios each containing 66 sheets of paper screenprinted with imagery from every decade of his career, from the Bauhaus period to early woodcuts, pre-Columbian influences and his Homage to the Square explorations. 

A realisation of the essential ideas in Albers’ works, Formulation: Articulation demonstrates the visual and material connections that drove the artist’s practice over the preceding forty years.

Arguably two of Josef Albers most important works in any medium, are the portfolios Gray Instrumentation I and II, made in 1974-75. Together they are the ultimate expression of Albers theoretical approach to colour. The basis for each work is the interactions between different shades of grey. This exploration by Josef Albers was prompted by seeing black and white photos of his Homage to the Square paintings.

In previous portfolios colours were typically printed on top of one another. However, the inks used in Gray Instrumentation I and II, were applied adjacently without overlapping, a level of precision that had not been seen in screenprinting before and a process more closely aligned with Josef Albers painting. Nick Fox Weber, Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, states “As a totality, the twenty-four prints that comprise these two portfolios are in many ways Albers’s ultimate masterpiece.”

Still driven by his need and desire to discover colour relationships beyond anything in his previous work, Josef Albers made Never Before in 1976, which developed upon ideas he had started exploring over twenty-five years earlier in painting. The portfolio was completed, but Josef Albers was too unwell to complete signing each work. As a result a number of prints remain unsigned.

David Cleaton-Roberts, Gallery Director explains, “At the time of his death, he had just completed the series aptly titled Never Before. While artists creating works in series is not unique to printmaking, the ability to formulate, develop, and present an idea through multiple images, tied together by an underlying ethos and/or medium was perfectly realised by Albers using techniques that simultaneously allowed for multiplicity, repetition, and variation.”

The individual plates that make up each portfolio in this exhibition challenge or echo one another, support or oppose one another, but when viewed together, the visual perception and interpretation achieved demonstrates that the whole is always much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Sum of the Parts: The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers is accompanied by a 144-page fully illustrated hard-back publication. Featuring texts by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and David Cleaton-Roberts, a senior director of Cristea Roberts Gallery.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

cristearoberts.com

The Sum of the Parts. The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 12 June - 29 August 2025

Bridget Riley @ Tate Britain, London

Bridget Riley 

Tate Britain, London 

21 July 2025 – 7 June 2026

Bridget Riley 

Concerto I, 2024 

Tate, Presented by the artist 2025 

© Bridget Riley 2025. All rights reserved

Tate announced that it has received the gift of a major recent painting by BRIDGET RILEY (b.1931), one of the most influential artists of our time. Premiering at Tate Britain as part of a new display of Riley’s paintings running until 7 June 2026, Concerto I 2024 has been generously donated by the artist and joins Tate’s holdings of her work spanning a remarkable six-decade working life.

Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain said: “We are extremely grateful to Bridget Riley for her generosity in making such a significant gift to the nation. Riley’s work changed the landscape of abstract art and Concerto I demonstrates how she continues to expand her practice while upholding a commitment to exploring energy and sensation through colour and form. We’re delighted to be able to show the painting in Tate Britain’s free collection displays over the next year, and I have no doubt it will soon become one of the best-loved works in the gallery.”

Bridget Riley 

Elongated Triangles 5, 1971 

Presented by the Institute of Contemporary Prints 1975. 

© Bridget Riley 2025. All rights reserved 

Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania)

Renowned internationally for her visually vibrant works, Bridget Riley’s particular approach to painting involves the skilful balancing of forms and colour to explore perceptions of space, balance and dynamism. Her recent works, Concerto 1 and Concerto 2 reflect the artist’s abiding love of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters and their engagement with colour. High in key, Concerto 1 is uplifting, while Concerto 2 explores hidden images.

Bridget Riley 

Fall, 1963 

Tate, Purchased 1963 

© Bridget Riley 2025. All rights reserved. 

Photo © Tate (Joe Humphrys)

Highlighting Riley’s dialogue with the sensory experience of sight, the new display includes Fall 1963, an important early abstract painting in Tate’s collection. The artist has described this painting as “a field of visual energy, which accumulates until it reaches maximum tension.” Using black and white curves, it evokes feelings of both elation and disturbance. Fall is being shown for the first time since receiving sustainable conservation treatment as part of GREENART, a groundbreaking new project researching ways to preserve cultural heritage using environmentally friendly materials.

Building on the long-standing relationship between Bridget Riley and Tate, this display is the artist’s fourth showing at the institution, having previously presented displays in 1973, 1994, and a large-scale retrospective survey in 2003. Fall was the first work by Bridget Riley to enter Tate’s collection in 1963 and has since been joined by nine paintings, 25 studies, and three works on paper by the artist. Concerto I is the first work by Bridget Riley created within this decade to be brought into Tate’s collection, expanding its representation of her practice.

Bridget Riley’s work is part of a series of regularly changing displays at Tate Britain to be staged since the gallery unveiled a full rehang in 2023. Collection works by Jacob Epstein, a key figure in the direct carving movement of the early 20th century, are currently installed in the Duveens Galleries at the heart of Tate Britain. Exploring the interplay between carving and modelling in Epstein’s work, monumental sculptures in stone are juxtaposed with bronze portrait busts. On 28 July, Pieter Casteels’s painting A Fable from Aesop: The Vain Jackdaw 1723 will be shown for the first time as part of a display looking at how artists have been inspired by birds. Several new artist interventions, first implemented with the rehang, will also appear throughout the collection. Found ceramics painted by Lubaina Himid will feature in the room exploring the rise of the urban metropolis in the era of Hogarth. Archive materials from Stuart Brisley’s time working on a project to record the experience of the inhabitants of Peterlee New Town and its surrounding villages will be included in the display exploring the place of abstract art in Britain’s post-war reconstruction.

TATE BRITAIN

Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

www.tate.org.uk

Kandinsky and Italy @ MA*GA Museum, Gallarate, Italy - Kandinsky e l'Italia @ Museo MA*GA, Gallarate

Kandinsky and Italy

Kandinsky e l'Italia

MA*GA Museum, Gallarate

Museo MA*GA, Gallarate

November 30, 2025 - April 12, 2026

In italiano qui sotto

ENRICO PRAMPOLINI

Composizione, 1950

Oil on masonite

MAGA Museum Collection, Gallarate

From 30 November 2025 to 12 April 2026, the MA*GA in Gallarate (VA) hosts a large retrospective revolving around the figure of Vassily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract art.

The exhibition focuses on the centrality of the Russian master's work and thought in relation to the European scene and, in particular, to the great season of Italian abstraction that developed between the 1930s and 1950s.

The exhibition recounts the birth of abstract art and its evolution in Europe and Italy, whose influences are still alive and well in contemporary art today. This journey through masterpieces from the MA*GA Museum and the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna di Ca' Pesaro, enriched by prestigious loans from public and private collections, showcases works by artists such as Paul Klee, Enrico Prampolini, Mario Radice, Atanasio Soldati, and Emilio Vedova.

Curated by Emma Zanella and Elisabetta Barisoni, designed and produced by the MA*GA Museum and the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna di Ca' Pesaro (VE).

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Dal 30 novembre 2025 al 12 aprile 2026, il MA*GA di Gallarate (VA) accoglie un’ampia retrospettiva che ruota attorno alla figura di Vassily Kandinsky, uno dei pionieri dell’arte astratta.

Curata da Emma Zanella ed Elisabetta Barisoni, progettata e realizzata dal Museo MA*GA e dalla Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro (VE), la mostra dal titolo Kandinsky e l’Italia si concentrerà sulla centralità dell’opera e del pensiero del maestro russo in relazione alla scena europea e, in particolare, alla grande stagione dell’astrattismo italiano che si è sviluppata tra gli anni trenta e gli anni cinquanta del Novecento.

Il percorso espositivo racconterà la nascita dell’arte astratta e la sua evoluzione europea e italiana, i cui esiti sono ancora oggi vivi e presenti nel linguaggio artistico contemporaneo, attraverso capolavori provenienti dai due musei, arricchiti da prestigiosi prestiti di collezioni pubbliche e private, di artisti quali Paul Klee, Enrico Prampolini, Mario Radice, Atanasio Soldati, Emilio Vedova.

MUSEO MA*GA

MA*GA MUSEUM

Fondazione Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea ‘Silvio Zanella’

Via Egidio De Magri 1, 21013 Gallarate (VA)

www.museomaga.it

Color Form Exhibition @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei, Hong Kong

Color Form

Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei, Hong Kong

March 21 – May 31, 2024

Lucio Fontana 

Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1968 

Water-based paint on canvas 

24 × 19¹¹⁄₁₆ inches (61 × 50 cm)

Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei

Pierre Soulages 

Peinture 101 x 130 cm, 16 août 2015 

Acrylic on canvas 

39¾ × 51³⁄₁₆ inches (101 × 130 cm)

Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei

Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei presents Color Form, an exhibition that delves into the two fundamental building blocks of painting—color and form—the two properties that lie at the heart of the medium’s potential. For modern physicists, color is seen as the eye’s perception of light waves of different frequencies—while form relates to the shape of matter. In science, as in art, the precise nature of this intrinsic relationship between light, energy, and matter is veiled. For artists, the creative relationship between form and color is one that has been explored intuitively ever since the first cave paintings made over 40,000 years ago. 

It is no accident that during the modern Atomic Age of the 1950s and ’60s—when the elemental nature of the relationship between light, energy, and matter had been made evident to all mankind— many painters began to focus uniquely on form and color in their work: elevating these two central components as the sole protagonists of their art. In America, this marked the period of color-field painting, with artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman creating large-scale canvases filled with blocks of emotive, abstract color. In Europe, another type of color-form painting also became a mainstay of various avant-garde artists from Pierre Soulages and Alberto Burri, to Lucio Fontana and Zao Wou-Ki. 

 

From the 1950s onward, each of these artists used their own modes of color-form abstraction to explore the intrinsic relationship between light, energy, space, and matter. For Pierre Soulages, as his Outrenoir (“beyond-black”) paintings reveal, the concentration on black pigment allowed for the discovery of illumination and light. “My instrument is not black,” Soulages insisted “but the light reflected from the black.” His works including Peinture 101 x 130 cm, 16 août 2015 and Peinture 309 x 181 cm, 12 décembre 2013, exemplify his ethos: “I found that the light reflected by the black surface elicits certain emotions in me. These aren’t monochromes. The fact that light can come from the color which is supposedly the absence of light is already quite moving, and it is interesting to see how this happens.” By applying paint in dense, material layers and using varied tools as well as brushes to generate smooth and rough surfaces, Soulages created surface textures that absorbed or emitted light. “Rather than movement, I prefer to talk of tension,” Pierre Soulages said, “and rhythm, yes. We can also say form: a shaping of matter and light.”

While Pierre Soulages made use of monochromatic fields of black to portray light, Italian artists such as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana took monochrome painting in other directions. For Alberto Burri, planes of single hues, as seen in Nero Cellotex (1986–87) became a means of exploring the innate nature and self expressive potentials of painted matter—while for Fontana, monochromatic tone was a vehicle for the articulation of deeper understandings of cosmic space.

In his investigations of space, including his Attese works, and Concetto spaziale, Attese (1968) in particular, Lucio Fontana destroyed the material surface of the canvas with a slash of a knife, opening up the saturated red picture plane to the embracing voids of space. In so doing, he created a painting that unites form, color, material, and space through his decisive gestures. A similar use of spontaneous energy to form painterly matter underpins the pictorial abstraction of Chinese artists like Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun, who, working in Paris from the 1950s onwards, sought to meld traditional Chinese painting with the color-form explorations of Western abstraction.

By contrast, Pat Steir’s Waterfall series reflects the attempts of an American-born artist to draw inspiration from Eastern approaches to color and form. Deeply influenced by Chinese literati paintings, Zen Buddhism, and the example of John Cage, Pat Steir’s work, exemplified by Another Place (2017), investigates the aesthetic potentials of chance, gravity, and the weight of pigment to generate a painting’s ultimate form. Pat Steir has said, “The way colors mix and the way they touch each other explains the world to me like mathematics explains the world to a physicist.”

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN & WEI

G/F, 2 Ice House Street, Central, Hong Kong

www.levygorvydayan.com