Bauhaus Live at The Aram Gallery
When this May the Barbican opened a major Bauhaus retrospective in the UK since the 1960s, it didn’t only organize a ‘normal’ high-end and widely acclaimed exposition. The programme created by the curators and their team, aimed both at browsing the school’s rich past as well as unveiling its relationships with the present. Hence, the London based The Aram Gallery has been invited to collaborate with the Barbican, in setting up their take on the Bauhaus’s legacy reflected in contemporary design practice.
Bauhaus, the revolutionary arts and design school founded in Weimar in 1919, has surely played a decisive role in shaping our visual culture. Although its influence was and still remains strong, its most notable heritage can be seen in the modernist practices of the 50s and 60s. With the subsequent appearance of post-modernist wave, it is sometimes difficult to figure out what contemporary designers have learned from Bauhaus and how has its influence been handed down through the years.
Interested in the way designers think and work, “Bauhaus Live” explores the way this hugely influential period is being manifested in the present. While in some cases the starting point of a project is traced with no difficulty, in others the reference is more subtle and appears through the use of colour, form and proportion. The invited designers show a vast array of projects, thus coherently replicating the original Bauhaus approach that touched almost everything man-made – from the spoon to the city. Among the names included in the show we must mention Konstantin Grcic, Martino Gamper, Jasper Morrison, Tomas Kral, David Chipperfield Architects, Sebastian Bergne, Peter Marigold and BCXSY.
The show runs until the end of this week at The Aram Gallery, London.
Rujana Rebernjak
