Albers and Morandi Exhibition at David Zwirner Explores Abstraction and Representation

David Zwirner Gallery in New York presented "Albers and Morandi: Never Finished" from January 7 to April 3, 2021 at 525 West 19th Street. The exhibition juxtaposed works by Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), two mid-20th-century artists with divergent approaches to painting. Albers, born in Bottrop, Germany, taught at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University, where he authored "Interactions of Color." His nearly two dozen paintings in the show primarily belonged to the "Homage to the Square" series, featuring nested squares that explore color interactions and spatial illusions. Morandi, who lived in Bologna, Italy with his three sisters, created still life paintings and etchings celebrated for extracting maximal light from minimally modeled objects. The exhibition included nine of his etchings and a dozen paintings, such as "Still life with white bottle and small blue bottle" (1955). Both artists shared preferences for small-scale works, reductive palettes, and compact, centered compositions. The installation featured individual paintings centered on vast walls at two points. Albers's 1958 work "Untitled (Variant/Adobe)" represented a departure from his square format. The exhibition probed the fragile division between abstraction and representation, revealing surprising affinities between the artists' patient determination and quiet vigor.