Looming large …
The great modernist weaver Anni Albers made one of the earliest forms of cultural expression relevant to the 20th century. While the future seemed to lie in the gleaming, hard surfaces of skyscrapers and rockets, her tactile creations, wrought on a handloom, went in the opposite direction.
Threads …
Excluded at the Bauhaus school from the boys’ club of painting, she made an old medium new. Her work echoes the concerns of her peers: geometric abstraction, the grid, the line. Yet it’s also rooted in the history of weaving itself.
The enigma code …
Intersecting was made when Albers was exploring ideas around written language: the lost codes of ancient texts and forms of communication such as weaving. Its title suggests the medium’s basics – the meeting of warp and weft – as well as its greater cultural resonance.
Draw a line …
The lines that wander down its vibrant vertical red, white and blue stripes suggest many things to the modern eye: Japanese calligraphy, scroll art, the rhythms of speech or music, the scribbles of a lie detector test, perhaps.
Anni Albers, Tate Modern, SE1 to 27 Jan
