One hundred years ago in Weimar, Walter Gropius established the most important avant-garde art academy of the 20th century. Bauhaus. Celebrating this anniversary, Bialystok's Arsenal Gallery has prepared an exhibition "See you after the revolution!" to which we cordially invite you.
Founded by Gropius, the academy revolutionized the ways of art education, creating "a new alliance between art and technology." In 1925, under pressure from conservative politicians, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where it developed and operated until 1931. The Nazi Party, which was coming to power at the time, took over the modernist school building and led to its closure in 1933. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, both teaching staff and Bauhaus students carried out the ideals of the school, working in Germany, the Soviet Union, the US, Tokyo and Chile.
The exhibition, according to the organizers, is a proposal to break down the monolithic vision of the Bauhaus, which assumes that it produced a homogeneous style or recipe for a "modernist aesthetic." For the exhibition, artists have been invited to analyze particular timelines of the school's legacy, objects have been borrowed from the Building Materials Archive in Dessau, as well as plans, design documentation and albums from archives in Weimar and Frankfurt. The optics adopted by the exhibition's curators focus on the revolution in the history of the Bauhaus (1928-1930), a period during which the school's director was Hannes Meyer, a Swiss architect who redirected the institution toward functional and economic design and toward cooperation with industry.
The exhibition is open to the public from October 19 to December 18, 2019. More information and a program of accompanying events is available on the Arsenal Gallery website.
