An exhibition in Siena on Josef and Anni Albers. And you can touch some original works!

Two great protagonists of the Bauhaus season, namely Josef Albers (Bottrop, 1888 - New Haven, 1976) and his wife Anni (Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann, Berlin, 1899 - New Haven, 1994) are the focus of the exhibition Josef and Anni Albers. Voyage inside a blind experience, on view at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena from April 6 to July 4, 2018. The exhibition, curated by Gregorio Battistoni and Samuele Boncompagni, aims to explore the innovations made by Josef and Anni Albers, who were respectively a painter, designer, teacher and color theorist, and a weaver, painter and teacher: if Josef was interested in the potential of materials, on which he never stopped experimenting, Anni focused instead on the potential of textiles, which became the starting point for her artworks. “Anni and Josef,” specifies Nicholas Fox Weber, director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, which together with Atlas Cultural Services set up the exhibition’s itinerary, “wanted their art to bring pleasure and new experiences into the lives of as many people as possible. They perceived a universal language and believed in forms of visual pleasure that extend backward and forward in time crossing all barriers. Working on this project we try to get inside what some people do not have, to unhinge the preconceptions of those who take sight for granted, to go beyond and rethink the experience.”

In fact, the organizers aim to create an exhibition that can be enjoyed by the visually impaired and those with visual impairments: the works will thus be accompanied by technologies that can provide the public with tactile and auditory suggestions. “An innovative approach,” explains Daniele Pitteri, director of Santa Maria della Scala, “that is concerned with merging in a single sensory and participatory cognitive exercise the visiting experience of sighted and blind people, inducing the former to expand their perceptive capacity through touch and the latter to approach the compositional and stylistic complexity of the works.”

The review focuses on a totalizing approach: if usually exhibitions approach the blind with a didactic approach, aimed at recognizing the work by retracing its compositional lines with touch, with the Sienese exhibition it will be possible to approach an aesthetic experience. Franco Lisi, director of the Institute of the Blind in Milan (which provided scientific support), says that “Our efforts-regardless of the different territorial realities and peculiarities-will be channeled to use all forms of communication in order to be able to launch a message that goes to enrich and enhance what we do for the culture of integration and, in particular, for blind people.” Part of this aesthetic experience will be the opportunity to touch, for the first time, five original works by Josef and Anni Albers: Anni’s Rail, a fabric from the 1950s produced for commercial purposes; Anni’s Montanius III, a relief print with which the artist attempted to manipulate form; DUO E, another Anni print without color or ink but with only relief lines; and Josef’s Homage to the square and Color study for homage to the square, two unfinished works in which it is possible to perceive the thicknesses of the impasto, the trowel drafting and the corrections in plaster.

To enhance the multisensory experience, the exhibition also makes use of a sensory corridor, dark, that will encourage tactile exploration of Josef and Anni’s materials by stimulating the audience to recognize qualities through touch, as well as special audio guides with hi-tech bracelets that communicate with tablets and smartphones to activate audio tracks, a music section that relates Josef and Anni’s works to the music contained on Command Records vinyls, for which they worked, tactile models with reproductions of the works, and again Josef Albers’ table, which recreates an experiment the artist described in his text Interaction of Color.

The exhibition, made possible thanks to an international collaboration between Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, The Glucksman, University College Cork, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Institute for the Blind in Milan, and Atlante Servizi Culturali, opens daily (except Tuesdays, closing day) from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Thursdays until 10 p.m. (last entry half an hour before closing). Mainz Publisher’s catalog. For information: www.santamariadellascala.com and www.vibe-euproject.com.

Image: Josef Albers, Homage to the Square (1969; oil on masonite. Copyright 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation). In the exhibition it will be possible to touch the work

An exhibition in Siena on Josef and Anni Albers. And you can touch some original works!

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