Steps, 1931 & Lattice work, 1926 - Joseph Albers

This search result page is possibly the most beautiful you will ever see? Recontextualized through the screen and arguably more powerful than the pigment in the flesh? Albers never supposed his work would be transformed from paint into photons surely but his colours were selected on the basis of their luminous quality - so fitting then they have here a new home?

Albers is one of the few I cared to study when I was at art school. The application of maths and colour theory infuses his work with spatial organisations of successive and simultaneous contrasts in colour. His methodical and scientific approach within a severely restricted format, employing utopian modernist ideals, were taught at the Bauhaus from 1923 until 1933 and continue to influence to this day. His ‘Interaction of Colour’, first published in 1971, is worth tracking down – it’s teaching is based on learning by direct perception. The key aspect then is how Albers set about realising some kind of aesthetic harmony through an analytical approach.

Owen Plotkin’s Colorbots are explorations of pure colour theory, taking Albers works, among others as a working framework.

Recently Albers was positioned alongside Moholy-Nagy at the Tate Modern’s - ‘From the Bauhaus to the New World’.