Bauhaus: Utopia in Crisis

Curated by Professor Daniel Sturgis

Artists: Juan Bolivar, David Diao, Liam Gillick, Maria Laet, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Ad Minoliti, Sadie Murdoch, Judith Raum, Helen Robertson, Eva Sajovic, SAVVY Contemporary, Schroeter und Berger, Alexis Teplin, Ian Whittlesea

Bauhaus: Utopia in Crisis explores how contemporary practitioners have been drawn to the social, utopian and transgressive aspects of Bauhaus history.

The exhibition was first staged at Camberwell Space and was part of the UAL: OurHaus festival, which Professor Sturgis has convened to coincide with Bauhaus 100, the international celebration of the famous Bauhaus design school’s centenary.

The diverse collection of artworks presented in this exhibition will investigate the ways in which artists today are reframing the Bauhaus’s modernist legacy as one which includes political and subjective resistance. As such, Bauhaus: Utopia in Crisis addresses how artistic legacies intersect with contemporary concerns through understanding that the Bauhaus was a complicated interweaving of different positions and personalities and never a truly unified project.

Through archival research, the Berlin based artist Judith Raum will present a series of new films which examine the position and personalities of Bauhaus artists such as Lilly Reich, Otti Berger and Gunta Stölzl who, as women, were limited to expressing their creativity in the weaving workshop.

The Anti Faschistische Aktion logo of Bauhaus student Max Gebhard and Max Keilson is represented by the Weimar based Schroeter und Berger in a politicised repositioning which aims to claim the logo as a classic piece of Bauhaus design through its contemporary international reach.

The importance of the transgressive and performative aspect of Bauhaus pedagogy is referenced in the works of the London-based US painter Alexis Teplin who employs costumed characters to perform dialogues derived from fictions and historical modernist texts to animate her abstract compositions.