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Squares, Grids, Color Theory — Mutina’s collaboration with the Albers Foundation is a match made in heaven
In Milan this year, Mutina started a major tile collaboration, including these tonal squares, color theory and The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Photos: Gerhardt Kellerman, Michela Pedranti
Josef Albers spent decades proving that color has no fixed nature: that it changes, bleeds, and evolves depending on its surroundings. Mutina, a company whose design language has long been programmed in this silent game, found in that belief something close to the mirror. The result of Mutina’s collaboration with The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation is Homage to the Square, a collection of ceramic tiles that does not recreate a series of figurative paintings by Albers – something that is forbidden by the foundation’s charter – but continues to think about it. Albers created more than 1,000 different types of artwork in the nearly 30 years he worked on, until his death in 1976, in an effort to investigate how colors can change in relation to both their context and their wider context. This collaboration gives the work a new life, a new audience, and a completely new content that can be lived, in this case – if installed at home – on a completely different viewing scale.
The individual items of the series are 15×15 cm tiles made of porcelain stoneware where the natural diversity of the firing process is preserved rather than engineered, and are available in two patterns and seven tones. The Dash places a glossy part inside a matte frame with four glossy squares clinging to its corners, each area catching light differently from every angle. The dot is quiet but understated: polished corner squares are set against a matte front. Both patterns can stand alone or be combined, each arrangement producing its own conceptual argument. The palette of Sea, Evergreen, Chocolate, Ice, Citron, Sage, and Peach was developed in collaboration with Albers Foundation curator Nicholas Fox Weber, through extensive research into glazes and colors specially designed to reproduce in ceramic the same tonal vibrations that run through Albers’ paintings. What Mutina understands, and what the collection shows, is that Albers wasn’t really talking about painting. He was speaking as we see it.
The Intertwining Geometries of Neri and Hu’s Mutina Tiles Inspired by Chinese Bamboo Braiding Techniques
Neri & Hu’s Mutina porcelain tile collection features different shapes and sizes that can be combined to match traditional Chinese weaving patterns. Photos: Michela Pedranti, Delfino Sisto Legnani
Shanghai-based architects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu have long worked at the intersection of cultural memory and modern form. Now, the two have turned their attention to Mutina’s ceramics, with two collections that feel less like products and more like arguments about how the past can be brought forward or transformed without diminishing it.
Weaving is the most expansive of the two: a series of full-body porcelain stoneware covers that summarize the ancient Chinese art of bamboo weaving into a familiar graphic language. Three interconnected shapes – San Jiao, Si Fang, and Ba Leng, named after triangle, square, and octagon – govern the rhythm of solids and voids, while a solid palette of matte tones imitates the progression of bamboo through maturity: only whites, creams, grays, blacks, and greens. The process is precise, each object is removed by hand and placed on a mosaic-like net, whose edges have a slight disturbance that separates art from construction. Controlled variations in the clay mixture and temperature fluctuations during firing give the surface a sense of movement.
Mutina often asks his collaborators to create a line of complementary tableware, and Neri and Hu responded briefly with Hé, a collection of wooden and ceramic dishes that redefine traditional geometries.the fangagainyuansymbols of earth and heaven in Chinese cosmology. (The two ship colors are, appropriately, morning and evening.) Together, the two collections do what Neri&Hu has always done best: translate the weight of a legacy into something you can live with now.
In a New Exhibition, Josef Albers’ Paintings Are Organized on a “Visual Journey” Aimed at Reshaping the Way We See.
On view through January 10 at Villa Panza are more than a dozen rarely seen works from Josef Albers’ Variant and Homage to the Square series. Photos: Michele Alberto Sereni
On the hill above Varese, inside the 18th century rooms of Villa Panza, 29 paintings do what Josef Albers spent his whole life showing what color could do: movement. “Josef Albers: Reflections,” now open in the Lombardy area that Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo converted into one of Italy’s great archives of post-war American art, brings together rarely seen works from Albers’ Homage to the Square and a different series in a rare interview setting. Curator Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Albers Foundation, selected each painting for its capacity to “realize Josef’s vision of color interplay to a degree that makes each of them incomparably admirable.” Some of those pieces, like the purple-orange icon “Orange Front,” will be familiar to anyone who visited Josef Albers’ Mexico exhibition at the Guggeheim in New York a few years ago. But others, such as Dark (1947) – a contrasting combination of gray and black, surprising in its intensity – evoke an unpleasant feeling of something like humiliation. “Art is not to be looked at. Art is looking at us,” Albers says in a video at the end of the show – a reversal that makes you question not just what you just saw, but everything you’ve ever looked at.
It’s understandable but very exciting that the show coincided with the Mutina collaboration, which feels like a license and like an honor. In both the Villa Panza exhibition and Mutina’s tiles, geometry is a visual tool rather than a decoration, and color is never static, never isolated, but alive in relation to everything around it. In Villa Panza – itself a layer of centuries, patrons, and ideas – that debate found its most fascinating address.
Shopping
COLORFUL, GEOMETRIC, ALBERS-INSPIRED DECOR
1. Visioni rug by Patricia Urquiola for cc-tapis, $8,626, mattermatters.com
2. Hanson nightstand by Lulu & Georgia, $898, luluandgeorgia.com
3. Thompson St. frame fabric. Studio, from $485, thompsonststudio.com
4. Pivot lamp by &Tradition, $565, lumens.com
5. Dounia Home square wall mirror, $2,000, douniahome.com
6. Green Laguna glasses, $1,400 for 6, cabanamagazine.com
7. Big Night tile coasters, $48 for 2, bignightbk.com
8. F51N chair by Katrin Greiling for Tecta, $7,297, rarify.co
9. Dash tiles by Albers Foundation for Mutina, mutina.it
10. Horseshoe by Magniberg, $1,900, magniberg.com
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KNITTED PESHA, NERI AND HU-INSPIRED AND MORE
1. Charlotte chair by Mario Botta, $4,350,artemest.com
2.Lotus lounge by Miller Yee Fong, price on request,radnor.co
3.Alford Bowl by Crate and Barrel, $119,crateandbarrel.com
4.Ravello sconce by Woven, $295,lumens.com
5.Le Roi side table by Norr11, $545,Finnishdesignshop.com
6.Cannage placemat by Dior, $430,dior.com
7.Anodized wicker screen by Tino Seuberg, price on request,tinoseubert.com
8.Tukki trolley by Ferm Living, $245,lumens.com
9.Bell wicker table lamp by Ellison Studios, $556.50,dwr.com
10.Weaving tiles by Neri & Hu of Mutina,mutina.it