Hommage to Josef Albers #01
Essays on Albers by the organisers of the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space
By Timo Rieke
Josef and Annie Albers never cease to amaze me. Their enduring relevance lies in a fundamental insight: that colour cannot be applied as a formula, but always enters into relationships.
For Josef Albers, colour is not a thing, not a substance, not a measurable stimulus. It is an event – and events require conditions. Colour emerges in relation: to the colours that surround it, to the light that falls upon it, to the material that carries it, to the space in which it appears, and not least to the eye and experience of the beholder. Anyone who opens Interaction of Color finds no system that guarantees results – but an invitation to test these conditions themselves. For Albers, knowledge about colour is always also self-knowledge: I do not see what is there. I see how I see.
This sets him fundamentally apart from theorists like Itten or Küppers, whose systems carry an implicit promise: master the rules and you master colour. Heinz von Foerster would have called that a trivial machine – same input, same output. Albers builds a non-trivial machine. His exercises produce answers that have already shifted by the time you look at them. This is not a weakness – it is the most honest description of how colour actually works. And perhaps the reason his work does not age: whoever offers no formula cannot be superseded.
No wonder that Luis Barragán – to whom both were personally close – hung a reproduction of Homage to the Square on the north wall of his living room. Some affinities need no explanation.
Albers devoted himself to a single theme with a consistency that has few parallels in art history. From that persistence, iconicity emerged – and a foundation that holds. Artists such as Donald Judd, Sheila Hicks, Ruth Asawa and Cy Twombly carried his thinking in entirely different directions, without exhausting it.
At this year’s Albers Workshop of the German Colour Association (Deutsches Farbenzentrum e.V.) and ICA Belgium, we want to experience precisely that: what it means not to possess colour – but to enter into a relationship with it.