Guillermo Mora at the Albers Foundation Artist Residency 2024

The Albers Foundation Artist Residency 2024, a program that has hosted over 200 artists, welcomes Spanish visual artist Guillermo Mora, in a project supported in part by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).

The Albers Foundation

Set in a broadleaf forest in New England, the Foundation’s main campus in Connecticut provides a peaceful and spacious environment for productive work. Artists have the added benefit of access to the Foundation’s archives and library. The Albers Foundation has been in Bethany since 1998, when it moved from the Alberses’ former home in nearby Orange, Connecticut.

Historically the homeland of the Naugatuck Native American tribe, Europeans settled in Bethany in the late eighteenth century. The buildings of the Albers Foundation were designed by Tim Prentice and Lo-Yi Chan. Prentice, who studied with Josef Albers at Yale in the 1950s, considers the project an expression of thanks to his former mentor.

The residency program commenced in 1999 and has to date hosted over 200 artists. This residency is supported in part by a grant from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), a state agency.

The project

The starting point of the NUDO.1963 [KNOT.1963] project is the year 1963 in the creative careers of Josef and Anni Albers. The project focuses on that year in the Alberses’ oeuvre, and aims to explore how the two artists’ languages intersected and merged. Inspired by the different artistic realities of those two creative minds, the goal is to create a series of playful object-books, which can be handled and manipulated by spectators and would function as dispositifs.

Guillermo Mora has always been fascinated by the porous, symbiotic nature of creative processes, and by the hybrid intermediate spaces generated by intersecting languages and disciplines. Therefore, this opportunity to directly explore the intersection of Josef and Anni Albers’s languages and create a new body of work will allow him to expand his conceptual, visual, and personal universe.

The object-books he intends to make will present two realities at once. They will create vertical chromatic pages; register the imprint of Anni’s writings while layering wefts and colors in Josef’s notebooks; endow paper and color with material substance; raise fabric; stitch optical figures; and overlap geometries and warps. The pieces will compress and expand space, just like the wide universe of these two artists.

Guillermo Mora

Guillermo Mora (Alcalá de Henares, Spain, 1980) lives and works in Madrid, Spain. In recent years, he has created a particular visual vocabulary in which formal elements like color gradients, layers, textures and shapes are used to create an abstract mode of communication. Mora’s compositions create environments through which the artist questions the protocols and procedures of contemporary painting.

Mora was featured in 100 Painters of Tomorrow by Thames & Hudson, awarded the Audemars Piguet Award in 2014 and the Generaciones 2013 Prize, and received the Residence grant in Casa Wabi, México in 2018, a scholarship at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York in 2016, the Residence at the Spanish College in Paris and a fellowship from the Spanish Academy in Rome in 2010–2011.

His exhibitions include Sí pero no at the Centre Pompidou Málaga (2023); Camino de vuelta at the Moisés Pérez de Albéniz Gallery, Madrid (2023); Un puente donde quedarse at Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid (2022); A Day with You at Irène Laub Gallery, Brussels; and Now, Soon, Then, Tomorrow at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, USA (2018).

Mora has also participated in group exhibitions such as Places and Events at KÖNIG Galerie, Berlin (2023); Una historia del arte reciente (1960-2020) at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca (2021); La pintura. Un reto permanente at CaixaForum, Madrid (2019); Querer parecer noche at CA2M, Madrid (2018); and The Object of Painting at Palácio das Artes, Oporto, Portugal (2018).

Mora’s work is included in the Caldic Collection at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami; the Colección de Arte Contemporáneo Fundación “La Caixa”, Barcelona; CA2M, Madrid; and the DKV Collection, among others.

He is represented by Irène Laub Gallery in Brussels, Casa Triângulo in São Paulo, and Moisés Pérez de Albéniz Gallery in Madrid.