Artists: Robert Adams - Josef Albers

With the American photographer Robert Adams (born 1937 in Orange, New Jersey) and Josef Albers (born 1888 in Bottrop, died 1976 in New Haven, Connecticut), Zander Galerie is presenting two outstanding protagonists of art after 1945 in conversation. While Adams’ photography focused on capturing the American West—from the vastness of the prairies through to the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean—, Albers examined the effects colors generate when set in reciprocal relationships, foremost in the paintings of his Homage to the Square series which he worked on from 1950 to 1976.

When Robert Adams was honored with a comprehensive exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop in 2013, the photographer reflected on a potential connection between his work and that of Josef Albers: “It might seem improbable, with those familiar works in mind, that he and I would share a commitment, but we do: neither of us is concerned with self-expression, but instead with form, and the sustaining quiet that can accompany its discovery.”

The exhibition is thus concerned with discovering a shared pictorial idea out of which the art of Adams and Albers then develops, independent of rigid categorizing ‘isms’ like realism or abstractionism, which given the positions of the two artists no longer seem relevant.

With his photographs since the 1970s Robert Adams is amongst the most trenchant critics of the ecological crisis, in particular the destruction caused by an urban sprawl encroaching into the countryside and the predatory exploitation of all natural resources. When he speaks about light, however, it is evident that his interests extend beyond this concern. Commenting on his important series The New West (1974), he notes: “The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible.”

The exhibition at Zander Galerie shows 70 photographs by Adams drawn from major work groups since the 1960s. They are accompanied by twelve paintings by Albers. The result is a fortuitous constellation in the sense of a ‘mutual illumination,’ precisely because the works of both artists in this exhibition emphasize that light is the basis of visual language.

The curator of the exhibition is Heinz Liesbrock, who was the director of the Josef Albers Museum from 2003 to 2022. During these years he presented important exhibitions on the history of Albers’ Homage to the Square and the influence Albers had on artists such as Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Ad Reinhardt. In 2000 he curated, together with Thomas Weski, the pathbreaking exhibition How You Look At It at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, which explored the history of photography in the twentieth century and its relationship to painting.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Steidl Verlag, edited by Heinz Liesbrock and Thomas Zander; it features 82 reproductions and essays by Heinz Liesbrock, John Szarkowski, and Colm Tóibín.