LONDON.- Cristea Roberts Gallery announces Ways of Making, Ways of Thinking (19 September – 18 October 2025), a group exhibition featuring groundbreaking contemporary artists, Rana Begum (b. 1977) Lubna Chowdhary (b. 1964), Eva Rothschild (b. 1971) and one of the most influential and innovative artists of the twentieth century, Anni Albers (1899 –1994).

Although these artists are best known for their three-dimensional work, this major show shifts away from hierarchical concepts of mediums and instead takes as its focus the alchemy, joy and spirituality each artist finds in materiality.

Lubna Chowdhary unveils her first suite of woodblocks as well as ceramic works; Rana Begum presents new lenticulars and mesh sculptures; Eva Rothschild showcases her latest explorations in screenprint; finally, graphic work by Anni Albers will be on show alongside unique pieces of jewellery loaned from the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation; all exhibited objects are informed by multidisciplinary approaches to materiality.

The title for the exhibition is a quote from Lubna Chowdhary made during a public conversation at her 2024 solo exhibition at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield. Known for her glazed ceramics, Chowdhary examines relationships between diverse visual languages, materials and processes. Her practice is informed by the desire to divide traditional conventions of making, seeking to break down the historical boundaries of art, that classified craft and pottery as less important than painting.

For her first major suite of prints, she has chosen to combine meticulously registered woodblock with etching; much like the process of glazing which requires careful planning to produce certain colours after an object enters the kiln, Chowdhary prepares the wooden matrix, then relies on the printing press and materials to transcribe the marks made by hand.

The new series of prints entitled Wells, 2025, reference legacies of global art movements and the historic Japanese printing technique of Bokashi, to evoke the image of portals, colliding histories, overlapping traditions, and shifting identities. The titles are drawn from historic wells in South and West Asia that act as sites of gath- ering, ritual, and sustenance, carrying deep cultural and historical resonances.

Known predominantly for her sculpture, Eva Rothschild works with a range of materials including aluminium, leather, fabric and acrylic, whilst also incorporating printmaking and most recently, in 2025, two major tapestries as a commission for Sadler’s Wells in London. For her first print series, she returned to a medium she has not engaged with since she was a student.

Garland, 2024 is a group of four multi-layered, hand pulled screen- prints alongside a series of related monoprints. They allude to classical architecture and can be approached as contemporary ruins, reflecting on the human traces within the monumental.

Rothschild’s segmented, undulating forms seem to disappear and extend beyond the surface of the paper; brightly coloured, playful and reminiscent of piping, these works create a sense of movement and space, a quality also echoed in Rothschild’s work as a ceramicist.

Rana Begum works with industrial materials, such as stainless steel, aluminium, copper, brass and glass to make sculptures and reliefs that explore geometry and the interplay of colour and light. The exhibition includes a new series of lenticular works which feature layered colours that, although presented on a flat surface, refract light in different directions to create the illusion of depth. Colours shift and change - yellows and reds become orange and pink - depending on the viewer’s position in front of the work.

Throughout her career as a pioneering textile artist Anni Albers used weaving, printmaking, jewellery and drawing, to develop a distinctive linear abstract aesthetic, typified by the use of non-traditional materials and bold colours. The artist was inspired to make jewellery after seeing the ancient necklaces discovered at the archaeological site of Monte Albán in Mexico. Albers then began to use everyday objects such as bobby pins and household items in her jewellery-making, describing how: “The art of Monte Albán had given us the freedom to see things detached from their use, as pure materials, worth being turned into precious objects.”

In 1963, during a visit to the Tamarind studio in Los Angeles, Albers was prompted to try printmaking. She took to the medium straight away, going on to produce a varied and important body of graphic work. During the final decades of her life she gave up weaving and devoted herself entirely to printmaking using silkscreen, emboss- ing, etching and offset-lithography for an array of different projects.

The works on show in Ways of Making, Ways of Thinking illustrate and explore how each of the four artists use of materials which, in the hands of others, would simply be utilitarian, but in theirs is transformed.