“Frederick Kiesler: Visions at Work Annotated by Céline Condorelli and Six Student Groups”, which opened on February 11th 2015 at Tensta konsthall, is the first exhibition in Sweden of Frederick Kiesler’s genuinely transdisciplinary work. Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) was an architect, artist, scenographer, pedagogue, theorist and – not least – a groundbreaking exhibition designer. From the 1920′s constructivist-inspired theater exhibitions in Vienna and Paris and the early 1930′s acclaimed shop window presentations in New York City to the legendary scenography for Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan gallery Art of This Century (1942) and the collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, Kiesler paved the way for a dynamic view of the art experience.
Working with the monumental ‘The Shrine of the Book’ (1965) in Jerusalem, he extracted ideas and forms from his often reproduced ‘Endless House’, a visionary bio-morphic building where, to quote Kiesler himself, ‘all the ends meet’. Underlying much of Kiesler’s work were his thoughts on the continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments, as defined in the theory of correalism. Although Kiesler was a member of de Stijl, a close friend and collaborator of Duchamp, André Breton, Alfred H. Barr and several other key figures in the art of the 1900′s, as well as an influential teacher at Columbia University in New York, he is something of an unknown.
The exhibition features models and documentations of Kiesler’s designs for exhibitions, buildings, interiors, shop-windows, etc. from various periods, while it also showcases prototypes, including those of his Mobile Home Library and the mass-produced so-called correalist furniture, among others. The focus will be on Kiesler’s interest in the intersection between art and life and how this manifests in his works.
Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Frederick Kiesler Foundation
