Untitled Document

HGCEA Historians of German & Central European Art & Architecture

01.05.2006

PRESS RELEASE

The exhibition Technical Detours: The Early Work of Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered

February 28-April 22,2006
Art Gallery of the Graduate Center, City University of New York

September 2 to October 31, 2006
the Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University in New Brunswick

The exhibition "Technical Detours: The Early Work of Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered" will be mounted at the Art Gallery of the Graduate Center, City University of New York (365 Fifth Avenue, New York City), from February 28 to April 22, 2006. It will then be show at the Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, from September 2 to October 31, 2006.

Front: László Moholy-Nagy, Architektur I or Konstruktion auf blauem Grund [Architecture 1 or Construction on blue ground], 1922, oil, metallic oil pigment and graphite on fine linen fabric, 65.2 X 55.4 cm. Collection of the Salgo Trust for Education

Back: László Moholy-Nagy, title unknown ("Eisenbahnbild mit Ackerfelder und 3" [Railway painting with farm fields and 3]), oil on fine linen fabric, n.d. [late 1920 or early 1921], 59 X 48 cm. Collection of the Salgo Trust
for Education

This exhibition will examine the early years of Moholy-Nagy's career, from just after the First World War, when his ambitions were as much those of a poet as of an artist, up to the time that he was hired to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923. The show includes more than 200 items, many of them of a documentary nature, such as period books, journals, manifestos and postcards, placing Moholy-Nagy into his various contexts, in Hungary, Vienna and Germany. Shown for the first time ever among the some 90 works of art in the show, are two major oil paintings on cardboard from 1918-19, a set of sketches on postcards of 1918 depicting Budapest café society, and two works by Kurt Schwitters given to Moholy-Nagy by the artist never before seen or published. Perhaps most importantly, the Salgo Trust for Education's newly discovered, early oil painting on canvas from Moholy-Nagy's dada period will be introduced, one that had been hidden for some 75 years on the verso of his early International Constructivist masterpiece Architekur 1. The show will examine, for the first time in an exhibition context, Moholy-Nagy's early literary ambitions, his role during the 1918-19 revolutionary period, his relations to organized politics, and his connections to the Lebensreform movement of early Weimar Germany, including its communes. It will close with an examination of the sources of his interest in alternative and new media such as photograms and immersive art, including the first-ever digital reconstruction and animation of his plans for a Dynamic-Constructive Energy System. In addition to pieces by Moholy-Nagy, there will be works of art shown by, inter alia, Béla Uitz, Lajos Kassák, Sándor Bortnyik, János Matti-Teutsch, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Dexel, Johannes Molzahn, Oskar Kokoschka, and Lazar El Lissitzky.

Oliver A. I. Botar, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Manitoba, is the curator of the show, being produced as a collaboration between the Salgo Trust for Education and the Art Gallery of the CUNY Graduate Center, Diane Kelder, Curator. A substantial exhibition catalogue will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition, the opening of which is on Tuesday, February 28th.