Albers created these over 80 years ago
Josef Albers
Rhenish Legend, 1921
Assemblage, glass and copper.
Park, 1924,
Glass, wire, metal and paint in a wooden frame.
Rhenish Legend (currently on display at Tate Modern, Albers and Moholy-Nagy, From the Bauhaus to the New World) is an example of an early abstract piece by Albers - he found the glass by scouring the streets of Weimar for broken bottles and windows. This work and others like it are called Scherbenbilder, or shard pictures, and are entirely consistent with the Bauhaus ideals of light and transparency. Likely influences on Albers were Johannes Itten (teacher at the Bauhaus) and the Dutch glass-artist Johan Thorn-Prikker. Albers studied with him in Essen and learnt how to make stained glass windows.
Albers was not just interested in glass as windows, however. He found reflection as important as transparency, and began using opaque glass.
To quote Michael White from the exhibition catalogue, "The common link from Albers' assemblages of the early 1920s to the sandblasted works is the mutual interplay between rough and smooth, opacity and translucency, reflection and dullness."
I should like to incorporate these qualities into my own work - I can sandblast panes of coloured and/or opaque glass, with my own designs. The first thing is to find a supply - back to the internet...
posted by Lynda Cornwell @ 4:33 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home