When I heard that Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’ would have a presentation of works in a gallery next to Josef Albers, I tried to think of all the ways in which their work would intersect; how they work in dialogue. It wasn’t that these shows were intended to be seen as a pair; David Zwirner’s space in Los Angeles can be broken up into multiple gallery experiences, but there was a conversation to be had between a master of color and a master of pop-cultural interrogation and play. But both Albers and Suarez Frimkess think about form and surface in similar ways, whether on canvas or drawing or on a sculptural object.
Josef Albers: Duets is a masterclass in pairing, in dualities. The exhibition gives the sense of color as relational versus. absolute: Albers insisted color is never fixed; it exists only in relation to surrounding colors. That produces constant dualities—one hue perceived as two or more depending on context. What struck me throughout this showing of works from the 1930s to the 1970s (and organized with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation) is both the illusion of flatness and depth and how unique Albers color palette really was. The ways in which Albers worked with the viewer in terms of color and space. He once said “color is the most relative medium in art,” and even in thinking of this, the colors he used almost seem entirely his own. I don’t know if anyone was ever able to pair and contrast colors the way he does, and Duets is a reminder of that mastery. The works on paper, especially, bring out the power of color, and the idea that you don’t see the same color twice, as he said “we do not see colours as they really are… In our perception they alter one another.”
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess works in a different duality. Her work consistently stages a taut duality between the vessel as object and its surface as a screen for pop‑culture imagery: thrown forms—cups, plates, pitchers—retain the quiet autonomy and functional grammar of ceramics, while their painted glazes erupt with cartoons, advertising motifs, art‑historical pastiche, and everyday iconography. That tension makes each piece both utilitarian artifact and pictorial tableau, so the domestic object becomes a mobile billboard for collective memory and wit. Seen at Zwirner under the organization of ceramic artist Shio Kusaka,Suarez Frimkess work is neither purely utilitarian nor purely illustrative but a hybrid that interrogates value, authorship, and the porous boundary between high craft and popular visual life. The fact that she is still in practice with this work at the age of 97 (read our feature on her late husband, Michael Frimkess, from Issue 01) is incredible and essential to understand that there are investigations she still pursues.
These shows work so well together, in harmony, because they both speak of a physicality with a concept: Albers in color and Suarez Frimkess in collective memory. There's something deeply human about both. —Evan Pricco
