Black Mountain College: The Experimenters

There is no such thing as a Black Mountain aesthetic, no dominant trend that unifies the artistic production of this small community. At Black Mountain, there was a desire to teach students to become more aware of the world around by instilling in them respect for the acts of both perception and process, all in the service of honing their critical skills. — Helen Molesworth

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 brings 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.

This exhibition features work by a group of artists who overlapped at Black Mountain College in the mid- to late 1940s—including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Leo Amino, Ruth Asawa, Elaine 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—and examines the threads of creative exchange that were interwoven when the paths of these teachers, pupils, and colleagues crossed.

Black Mountain participants’ ambitions to transform habits of perception, systems of intention, and patterns of tradition have essential implications for understanding not only modernist but subsequent art practices.
— Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College

The gallery is open Tues – Sat from 10am – 6pm.