Camino Real is seen for the first time outside Mexico City

Anni Albers's largest work, Camino Real (1968), is seen for the first time outside Mexico City in the exhibition Anni Albers at David Zwirner Gallery, New York (10 September–19 October 2019). Originally commissioned in 1967 by architects Ricardo Legoretta and Luis Barragán for the newly built Camino Real Hotel this wallhanging of appliquéd felt is over ten feet high and almost as wide. To achieve its large scale Albers enlisted the Manhattan company Abacrome that fabricated appliquéd flags and banners for artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselman, and Claes Oldenburg in the 1960s. Albers's embrace of a process that was closely associated with Pop artists is a perfect example of her consummate sense of appropriateness and her courage to experiment with new materials and methods. The results of this unlikely process pleased her so much that she adapted her original drawing for the project as the basis for a screenprint Camino Real.