Swiss venue hosts first retrospective of Anni Albers, the architect of the thread

Bern. When Anni Albers entered the Bauhaus weaving workshop in 1922, she did so without enthusiasm. She considered it “too feminine,” the only space that the most revolutionary school in Europe allowed women. Nor did he imagine that he would have an artistic career. He said it clearly: the word “art” was not in his vocabulary, nor was “career.” Years later, this reluctant student had transformed weaving into a contemporary plastic language and had become the great teacher of modernist textile art.

From November 7 to February 22, 2026, the Zentrum Paul Klee presents the first retrospective in Switzerland of Anni Albers (1899-1994), curated by Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Brenda Danilowitz, which covers all stages of her career, including her numerous trips to Mexico, with a special interest in exploring the relationship between art, fabric and architecture.

Albers had entered the Bauhaus – the German school that revolutionized artistic education by integrating art, technique and everyday life – moved by the need to find direction. Great figures taught at the school: her future husband, Josef Albers, as well as Paul Klee, who provided her with the theoretical bases of her work in design, structure and color. That textile workshop that he chose with reservations became his intellectual laboratory: between warp and weft he discovered the structure of the grid, the foundation of both weaving and modern abstraction.

John Dewey, inspiration

The closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, due to Nazi pressure, forced the Albers to emigrate to the United States, where Josef was invited to teach at the newly founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a hotbed of the American avant-garde and inspired by the progressive ideas of John Dewey. There they both resumed the experimental spirit of the Bauhaus and laid the foundations of modern artistic education.

He worked in the industrial field creating fabrics for architecture, where he combined natural fibers and industrial materials – such as rayon, cellophane, Lurex or aluminum. With this he transformed the fabric into a flexible architecture, exploring contrasts of texture, light and resistance.

In 1949 she became the first textile artist to present a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), which toured more than twenty cities in the United States and Canada.

Anni Albers conceived weaving not as a feminine practice, but as a form of universal knowledge that crosses cultures and times. He especially admired the weavers of ancient Peru, to whom he dedicated his book On Weaving (1965), a fundamental work for artists and designers that contains their theoretical and practical reflection, republished in 2018 with color images, with dedication: “To my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.”

In her teaching work at Black Mountain College, she taught how to build primitive looms, such as the Andean backstrap, convinced that they contained the same structural complexity as a modern power loom.

Wisdom meeting

The exhibition includes works closely linked to the 14 trips that the Albers made to Mexico between 1935 and 1967. Highlights Escritura antigua (Ancient Writing, 1936), the first of his pictorial fabrics (pictorial weavings), a group of works that he made until 1968, where he explored weaving as an autonomous visual art before dedicating himself to engraving. Woven from shiny black rayon and geometric shapes that evoke archaic symbols, the work explores the idea that threads, like writing, can articulate thought and memory.

In 1967, architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán commissioned a mural tapestry for the Camino Real hotel in Mexico City, titled Camino Real (1968), one of his most emblematic works and rarely seen outside the country. The influence of Latin American art and its large-scale technical mastery converge there.

In Mexico, Albers found a source of aesthetic and spiritual renewal. In a letter to his friends Wassily and Nina Kandinsky, in August 1936, he wrote: “Mexico is full of art like perhaps no other country,” alluding in particular to pre-Columbian and popular art. What moved her most were the “beautiful little clay faces” found at archaeological sites and the folk pieces that she and Josef devotedly collected.

Pre-Columbian art revealed a material wisdom where form and meaning were inseparable. In texts like Pre-Columbian Mexican Miniatures (1970), expressed gratitude towards the “anonymous creators of small large objects” who inspired his idea of ​​art as a material and spiritual act.

The Zentrum Paul Klee retrospective closes a circle opened more than a century ago. That former student demonstrated that textiles contain a conceptual complexity comparable to that of any other artistic discipline. Today, at a time of renewed recognition of textile art, Anni Albers no longer needs to be vindicated: her work proved decades ago that a thread can be as revolutionary as a brush or a chisel.

The exhibition is organized together with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, in collaboration with the Belvedere museum in Vienna, where it will subsequently travel from April 30 to August 16, 2026.