Anni Albers

With her forward-thinking and experimental approach to weaving, Albers managed to change the view of weaving as a craft discipline, and instead developed it as a modern medium across art, design and architecture.

She gained increasing recognition for her redemption of the Bauhaus movement's radical vision of the fusion of art and life, which meant that in 1949 she was the first textile designer to be allowed to exhibit solo at MoMA in New York. Her sensuous textile works explore weaving's multifaceted potential for imagery, linguistics and architectural functionality.

She was inspired by Peruvian weaving traditions and German mathematical knot theory in her studies of the possibilities of working with the tissue's embedded grid structure and the different textures of the threads in an artistic form language.

Albers worked with the material - and with the machine - to explore what they both could offer as an instrument for a visual artist, just as an instrumentalist works with the sound of his instrument.