Albers and Morandi “Never Finished”

David Zwirner 20th Street

This event has ended.

David Zwirner presents Albers and Morandi: Never Finished, an exhibition exploring the formal and visual affinities and contrasts between two of the twentieth century’s greatest painters: Josef Albers (1888–1976) and Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964).

Both Albers and Morandi are best known for their decades-long elaborations of singular motifs: from 1950 until his death in 1976, Albers employed his nested square format to experiment with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects, while Morandi, in his intimate still lifes and occasional landscapes, engaged viewers’ perceptual understanding and memory of everyday objects and spaces. Building on the connections established between the two artists in dual shows in 2005, Josef Albers, the first major exhibition of Albers’s work in Italy at the Museo Morandi, Bologna, and Giorgio Morandi: Landschaft (Giorgio Morandi: Landscape) at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany, Albers and Morandi: Never Finished will put each artist’s distinctive treatment of color, shape, form, morphology, and seriality in dialogue. Looking specifically at the stunning palettes of Morandi’s celebrated tabletop still lifes depicting humble vessels and vases and Albers’s seminal Homage to the Square series, the exhibition will elucidate how the two artists’ careful daily acts of duration and devotion allowed each to highlight the essence of color and the endless possibilities of their respective visual motifs.