Josef Albers, To Monte Alban from the series Graphic Tetonic, 1942

Josef Albers is best known for his later works, but his systematic presentation of “spatial ambivalence and paradox, made through endless variations on geometric themes and juxtapositions of colour, hard-edged rectangles within rectangles of flat color. Throughout the 1940s, while teaching. at Black Mountain College in California, he made frequent trips to Mexico. He was inspired by the architecture and artefacts seen there and absorbed their abstract, formal qualities into his prints made during the 1940s. Albers went on to make a series of lithographs collectively titled ‘Graphic Tectonic’ with very precise linear structures but, which through repeated and closely drawn parallel lines, and the use of right-angles, create powerfully ambiguous visual illusions of space and volume.

Key Points:

• Spacial Feelings (Mixed)
• Illusions
• Geometric Themes
• Hard Edges (Rectangles)
• Linear Structures
• Continuous Lines
• Various Levels

Monte Alban, an ancient hill-top city in the Oaxaca region of Mexico, is now an archeological site with a maze of underground passage ways, rooms, drainage and water storage systems

Diagrams:

1.) Low Density

2.) High Density

3.) Hierarchy

4.) Downward Movement

5.) Upward Movement

6.) Overall Movement

7.) Symmetry of Space

8.) Rotational Symmetry

9.) Descending Ground/ Ground Level

Plan Idea