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Anni Albers: Camino Real

Contributions by Brenda Danilowitz and T’ai Smith
Published by David Zwirner Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
LIST PRICE $60.00

About The Book

The first in-depth study of a monumental wall hanging—rediscovered after many years—by renowned Bauhaus artist Anni Albers.

Albers was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art. Her exquisite wall hanging Camino Real—seen in public for the first time since 1989 at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, and the subject of this book—is a superb example of this modern master’s work.

In 1967, noted architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán commissioned Albers to create a work for the newly built Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. Completed in 1968, her striking wall hanging Camino Real is heavily influenced by Latin American art and culture. Showcasing Albers’s approach to working with textiles as a “many-sided practice,” it is accompanied in this book by works Albers made following her move to the United States in 1933, including innovative wall hangings, weavings, and a range of works on paper. Together, these works reflect Albers’s brilliant embrace of different materials and techniques and her ability to work at varied scales. The works in this publication offer additional context and motifs, demonstrating the artist’s pioneering investment in textiles as an art form and her parallel interest in mass-produced designs.

Published on the occasion of the Anni Albers exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this catalogue features new scholarship from the show’s curator, Brenda Danilowitz, art historian and chief curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and T’ai Smith, an expert on Bauhaus craft and weaving.

About The Author

Product Details

  • Publisher: David Zwirner Books (October 13, 2020)
  • Length: 120 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781644230428

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Raves and Reviews

“Beyond her intricate patterns and sumptuous, threaded surfaces, Anni is also a crucial figure in the story of 20th-century art education.”

– Alina Cohen, Artsy

“The highlight is Albers’s recently rediscovered tapestry ‘Camino Real’...Ten feet square, it agglutinates irregularly alternating triangles of pink, scarlet and wine into a syncopated pattern that seems to shift and fizzle.“

– Jason Farago, The New York Times

“She created work at the intersection of form and function, utility and art—a blurred distinction rooted in her love of letting the fabrics be her guide, working with the material instead of against it. In this way she was a quiet pioneer, an artist’s artist.”

– Grace Edquist, Vanity Fair

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