GROUP SHOW

David Zwirner is pleased to announce Black Mountain College: The Experimenters, a group exhibition on view in The Upper Room at the gallery’s London location. Presented in tandem with Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants, displayed on the gallery’s ground and first floors, this exhibition will bring together works by a group of artists whose groundbreaking career trajectories were informed by the rich visual and intellectual innovations that emerged around Black Mountain College, the famed experimental liberal arts school in rural North Carolina that in the 1930s and 1940s became, as the writer Amanda Fortini recounts, ‘the site of a genius cluster.’

Featuring work by a group of artists who overlapped at Black Mountain in the mid- to late 1940s—including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Leo Amino, Ruth Asawa, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Ray Johnson, as well as figures such as Sue Fuller and Sheila Hicks, who studied with and befriended members of this group at other notable institutions during the same period—the exhibition will examine the threads of creative exchange that were interwoven when the paths of these teachers, pupils, and colleagues crossed. As Asawa once recalled, the enduring progressive ethos of this artistic circle could be encapsulated by the way in which her teacher, Josef Albers, would introduce his Black Mountain course on Basic Design: ‘Open your eyes and see. My aim is to make you see more than you want to. I am here to destroy all your prejudices. If you already have a style don’t bring it with you. It will only be in the way.’

Presented in tandem with Josef Albers, Paintings Titled Variants