At Villa e Collezione Panza
My painting isn't noisy. [...] I try to create the silence of an icon. That's what I'm after: the meditative icons of the 20th century. (J. Albers)
Stop. Catch your breath. Inhale deeply as you go inside the colors. Let them penetrate you as you immerse yourself in them. (N.F. Weber)
Josef Albers. Meditations, a unique presentation of paintings by Josef Albers, opens at the Villa e Collezione Panza in Varese, Italy, from 9 April 2026 to 10 January 2027. The exhibition brings together twentynine rarely seen masterpieces from Albers’ Variant/Adobe and Homage to the Square series in a lean and spacious arrangement that gives an unprecedented sense of the poetry and alchemy of these paintings. Presented by the FAI - Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano ETS and the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, the works in Meditations have been meticulously selected from public and private collections across Europe and the United States, in a way that reveals Albers’ particular magic as never before.
Video editing by Stefano Santamato © FAI
Invited by Gabriella Belli, curator of scientific programming at Villa e Collezione Panza, Nicholas Fox Weber, curator of Josef Albers. Meditations and Executive Director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, was guided by the fundamental Albersian idea that artworks and objects of original vision and fine craftsmanship, regardless of the time or place in which they were created, can be enriched by their confluence. The result is an original and evocative installation, capable of offering a renewed perspective on Albers’s practice, one that is essential, rarefied, and contemplative, much like the spirit that has always guided the research of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, and which continues to shape the experience of visiting Villa and the Panza Collection today.
Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square: Vernal, 1957. Private Collection. Ph. Michele Alberto Sereni, 2026 © FAI
Displayed on the first floor, in the eight rooms overlooking the villa’s gardens, the works have been selected by Weber to evoke precisely those slow, gentle, "meditative" effects that Albers identified as essential to understanding a work of art, and which Giuseppe Panza sought to achieve in the layout of his house-museum. The exhibition is not structured as a chronological retrospective, but as a perceptual journey, conceived as an "exercise in seeing", in which the works become tools of inquiry.
Josef Albers, Orange Front, 1948-58. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venezia/Venice. Ph. Michele Alberto Sereni, 2026 © FAI
Visitors are invited to move through spaces built upon chromatic harmonies and dissonances: from the harmonies of the first room, with the whites and acid yellows of Lone Whites (1963), Dimly Reflected (1963), Ascending (1962) and Polar (1963), in which the shades of a single colour are revealed progressively, to spaces of greater chromatic tension, where oranges and pinks act as a counterpoint to the cool, dark tones. The exhibition ultimately leads to the denser shades of greys, browns and blacks in Night Sound (1968), Dark (1947) and Profundo (1965). Among the exceptional loans are Orange Front from the Guggenheim in Venice and Homage to the Square from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, alongside works rarely shown to the public, such as Dark, on loan from the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation and selected by Weber precisely for its intensity. A final section featuring video works further illustrates the method of an artist who profoundly transformed 20th-century painting.
From left to right: Homage to the Square: Tap Root, 1965, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT, USA; Study for Homage to the Square: Night Sound, 1968, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT, USA; Study to Homage to the Square: Quiescen, 1952, Collezione Privata/Private Collection. Ph.Michele Alberto Sereni, 2026 © FAI
Marco Magnifico, President of FAI – Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano ETS: "Every great artist experiments with and explores their own artistic language through a series of works that are very often multiple ‘variations on a theme’. Each variation is a unique and original reflection which – when combined with others, as in this exhibition – allows us to deepen, with the necessary time and calm, our understanding and appreciation of a complex poetics that is not always immediately apparent at first glance, such as that of Albers. Bringing together as many as 29 works by an artist of this calibre here in the home of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo was a bold undertaking strongly championed by the FAI and realised only thanks to the tenacity of Gabriella Belli and the extraordinary generosity of the Albers Foundation.This is the first opening without Maria Giuseppina Panza di Biumo, to whose dear memory this exhibition is dedicated in grateful remembrance of her generous commitment to Villa Panza. Together with her husband Gabriele Caccia Dominioni and their three children, she donated Meg Webster’s Cone of Water, the centrepiece of Villa Panza’s monumental courtyard."
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