Josef Albers

LEWIS GLUCKSMAN GALLERY
University College Cork
April 5–July 8

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1967, oil on Masonite, 28 x 28".

The simplicity of the one thousand–plus works in Josef Albers’s “Homage to the Square” series, 1949–76, is utterly deceptive. Layering colored square upon colored square, though never mixing the colors themselves, Albers proved that color is relative, that it plays on the optic nerve, and that proximity alters perception. These spare, subtly sophisticated works are so incorporated into the visual language of abstraction that it is a wrench to realize how influential and groundbreaking they originally were.

“The Sacred Modernist” gives a rare opportunity for Irish audiences to see a selection of Albers’s best work, drawn primarily from the collection of the Albers Foundation. The exhibition also goes further back, to show some of his first works, including the earliest known: an ink drawing of a church, Stadtlohn, 1911. Drawings of churches, cathedrals, and cruciform shapes recur, leading to the conclusion posited in the exhibition title—that Albers was not only an artist who happened to be Catholic, but also a Catholic artist. A reconstruction of his stained glass window Rosa Mystica Ora Pr[o] Nobis, 1918–2011, made for the Church of St. Michael in Bottrop, Germany, and destroyed in the Second World War, has been re-created here, and it appears to present a central clinching argument to this exhibition’s thesis that Albers’s work was not only informed by, but evangelized by, his Catholic faith. That said, sketches including the undated Strasborg Münster show a concern with sacred geometries as much as ecclesiastical architecture itself. And the “Homage to the Square” paintings; “Structural Constellation” series, 1948–54; and paintings like Related 1 (red), 1938, and Tautonym (B), 1944, reveal Albers to have been concerned more with the transcendent and spiritual than with a specific religious ethos. So ignore the title, and instead revel in this wonderful work.

— Gemma Tipton