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

Corita Kent @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC – "heroes and sheroes" Exhibition

Corita Kent: heroes and sheroes

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

July 8 – August 13, 2021

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents heroes and sheroes, an exhibition of artworks by CORITA KENT at 22 Cortlandt Alley. Centered on Corita Kent’s series of the same title made between 1968 and 1969, the exhibition marks the first time heroes and sheroes has been exhibited in New York in its entirety.

In the summer of 1965, following the Watts Uprising in Los Angeles, Corita Kent reproduced the front page of the Los Angeles Times within her work my people. While in previous years, Corita Kent had appropriated text from consumer and mass culture, my people is the first example of Kent using appropriation as a direct response to the socially charged events of her time. The paper’s headlines were rotated and partially obscured by a swath of red, in which Corita Kent handwrote a text attributed to Maurice Ouellet, a priest and civil rights activist who participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches earlier that year. Ouellet’s words form a rebuttal to the paper’s racially charged headlines describing the Uprising as a “Blood Hungry Mob.”  In response, Ouellet’s quote reads: “Youth is a time of rebellion. Rather than squelch the rebellion, we might better enlist the rebels to join that greatest rebel of his time-Christ himself.” 

In the years following, Corita Kent continued to create singular compositions, in which bold and colorful text promoted messages of faith, acceptance, and love. Simultaneously, Kent rose to national prominence as a public figure - she was named Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year in 1966 and featured on the December cover of Newsweek in 1967. With this exposure came increased scrutiny of Kent’s outspokenness as the conservative Archdiocese of Los Angeles mounted intense pressure on both Kent and her order, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, over the changes they were making under the directives of Vatican II. In the summer of 1968, Kent would take a sabbatical from Immaculate Heart College, subsequently leaving the order and seeking dispensation from her vows.

This would mark a key turning point in Carita Kent’s work, as she began heroes and sheroes later that same year. Reflecting on the social and political movements of the time, much like my people before it, heroes and sheroes demonstrates not only Kent’s advocacy but also her acute awareness of how these events were framed and disseminated through mass media. Collaging images appropriated from newspapers and magazines with poetry, song lyrics, quotations from figures within the religious left (such as Daniel Berrigan and the Catonsville Nine), and Carita Kent’s own writings, heroes and sheroes addresses issues such as the civil rights, labor, and anti-war movements, nuclear disarmament, and the political assassinations that defined the 1960s. Works like the cry that will be heard reflect the urgency of the moment, imploring the viewer to “give a damn about your fellow man.” Other works, notably american sampler, position themselves as acerbic critique. Utilizing the colors red, white, and blue, Kent riffs on the tradition of the “sampler”, a piece of embroidery used to demonstrate a variety of needlework techniques. Here, Corita Kent’s sampler repeats the words AMERICAN, ASSASSINATION, VIOLENCE, and VIETNAM in stacked lines that resemble the stripes of the flag, using shifts in color to highlight different combinations of words such as SIN, I, and NATION. Prompting the viewer to consider their own individual and moral responsibility, the work’s last line poses the question “WHY” next to the answer: “WHY NOT.”

Filling the main gallery at 22 Cortlandt Alley, the twenty-nine prints comprising heroes and sheroes reflect the enduring spirit that gave rise to Corita Kent’s nickname—“Joyous Revolutionary.” The series simultaneously highlights the potential of new life, a belief in the power of collective action, and the joy that exists in the everyday. Shying away from optimism, Kent instead emphasized the importance of hope in works like a passion for the possible, employing the image of an energetic crowd of demonstrators, arms extended upwards in peace signs. Positioned above the photograph is a text from activist and clergyman William Sloane Coffin, which still resonates over fifty years after its making: “...hope demands that we take a dim view of the present because we hold a bright view of the future; and HOPE AROUSES AS NOTHING ELSE CAN AROUSE A PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE.”

CORITA KENT (1918–1986) was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice. Earlier this year, Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to designate Corita Kent’s former studio at 5518 Franklin Avenue as a Historic-Cultural Monument. Corita Kent’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; SFMOMA, San Francisco; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; mumok, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Frac Ile-de-France, Paris; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, among others. Notable exhibitions include: Corita Kent: Get With The Action, Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft (2019); Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge (2015); Someday is Now, Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (2013); People Like Us: Prints from the 1960s by Sister Corita, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2007).

This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Corita Art Center, Los Angeles.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

22 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY 10013

www.andrewkreps.com

Andy Warhol: Camouflage, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

Andy Warhol: Camouflage

Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

October 30, 2010 — February 5, 2011

Honor Fraser presents Andy Warhol: Camouflage, an exhibition that includes silkscreens on canvas, unique trial proofs on board, and screenprints. This marks the first comprehensive west coast exhibition, in over ten years, of Andy Warhol's late series, the Camouflage works. The exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with an essay by Vincent Fremont. Please find excerpts from his essay below.

While Andy Warhol was still alive, I can only remember on one occasion that a Camouflage painting of his was exhibited. It was a 72 x 72-inch fluorescent, hot-pink, and yellow version that was included in a group show in 1986 at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City.

The Camouflage paintings were not shown publicly until six years after Andy's death. In September of 1993, with the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Foundation, an exhibition entitled Andy Warhol Abstrakt opened at the Kuntshalle in Basel, Switzerland. For the first time ever, large Camouflage paintings measuring from 50 x 198-inches to 116 x 420-inches were presented in a groundbreaking and intriguing survey of the work resulting from Andy's interpretation and experimentation with abstract painting.

The Camouflage paintings were a personal vision of Andy's. No gallery had commissioned him to create these paintings for an exhibition. It all started in 1986 when Andy asked his art assistant, Jay Shriver (who was also an artist) what he was working on. Andy had agreed to let Jay work four days a week as long as Jay created artwork in his own studio on his day off. Jay told Andy that he was making small abstract paintings by pushing paint through the mesh of a piece of military camouflage cloth. Andy immediately realized making paintings of the actual camouflage shapes and patterns would be a great idea. He sent Jay off to the local Army/Navy store on Fifth Avenue near Union Square to buy some camouflage fabric. When Jay returned they photographed the cloth and the project began. Andy had the mesh pattern removed from the pictures of the camouflage cloth so just the shapes remained. Andy had a good experience creating this series of Camouflage paintings; from the very large-scale to the very small-scale versions measuring only 9 x 9-inches. He was so pleased with the results of the paintings he decided to publish his own limited edition of Camouflage prints.

Andy asked Rupert Smith, the printer who had also worked on the paintings, to make trial proofs for the print edition. Rupert made eighty-four 38 x 38-inch trial proofs and Andy selected eight to be printed, with the same colors and imagery, for the regular and artist proof editions. Each of the 84 trial proofs is unique, one of a kind, and that is what makes them extraordinary, especially within the Camouflage series.

This exhibition offers a rare chance and arguably the first chance to see a group of Camouflage paintings paired with a group of Camouflage trial proofs.

HONOR FRASER GALLERY

2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034

www.honorfraser.com