Bauhaus exhibition in Münster

What do you associate with the Bauhaus era? We mainly architecture and furniture, but certainly also because we live in a settlement (UNESCO World Heritage Site Großsiedlung Siemensstadt in Berlin) where there are also buildings by Walter Gropius and we live in one of them. In Münster, we were able to get to know a completely different and very interesting aspect of the Bauhaus movement for the first time.

Walter Gropius founded an art school in Weimar in 1919, where different trades and arts met and also worked together in an interdisciplinary way. The work here influenced numerous modernist artists, and works were created that dissolved the boundaries between different arts. After the closure of the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1932 and in Berlin in 1933, many artists left Germany and emigrated to America. A Bauhaus scene developed in America that has shaped the concept of art to this day.

100 years of Bauhaus will be the subject of many events in Germany in 2019. In Münster, the LWL Museum of Art and Culture is dealing with the topic until March 10, 2019. We took a look at the exhibition “Bauhaus and America. Experiments in Light and Movement”. For us something completely new, because here the focus is on an area of the Bauhaus movement, with which we have not yet come into contact.

At the beginning, the exhibition deals with the theme of dance, performance and stage design. In the foreground of the work of the Bauhaus – artists were hardly wearable costumes and rather limited movements. It was important to the artists that the focus was on the, through the movement emerging forms. They worked creatively with wood, glass and metal to illustrate their ideas.

One artist who was active in this Bauhaus movement was Xanti Schawinsky. His work focus is very well represented in the Bauhaus – exhibition in Münster. There are pictures that show how he wanted to represent elements in space, how they should be positioned so that they can work properly on a stage.
Another artist of that time was Oskar Schlemmer. For him, dance was considered an experiment in movement and space. He sought alternative forms of movement, which were the main focus of his choreographies. Here, too, you can see some interesting works in the Bauhaus exhibition in Münster.

Bauhaus Ausstellung in Münster, LWL-Museum Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Lichtrequisit

László Moholy-Nagy is one of the artists who dealt with the subject of light and movement during the Bauhaus era. From him, for example, you can see a very impressive large-scale light sculpture. This is put into action twice a day and offers the spectators interesting insights into his work.

Another focus of the Bauhaus exhibition in Münster is Op Art, which was represented by Josef and Anni Albers, for example. They first considered how optics and perception are linked. Thus they created works in which the eye is “manipulated” by special color contrasts in such a way that it sees 3-dimensional images, although they are 2-dimensional works. I particularly enjoyed this section of the exhibition. The works were interesting and impressive.

We were very enthusiastic about the visit to the temporary exhibition at the LWL Museum. We were able to get to know a stylistic epoch under a completely new aspect and gathered a lot of lasting impressions.