Study visit in the Bauhaus

Well, Barbican, London actually. But this exhibition promises to contextualise the Bauhaus so effectively that you may feel imbued with a sense of the world’s first, and most famous, modern art school. OCA is offering a study visit at this significant exhibition on Thursday 28 June, so book up your place to join us there by emailing or calling OCA enquiries.
The Barbican Art Gallery in the city of London, presents Bauhaus: Art as Life, a major new exhibition. From avant-garde arts and crafts beginnings to a new pedagogical model uniting art and technology the Bauhaus’s utopian vision sought to change society in the aftermath of the First World War, to find a ‘new way of life’.
Bauhaus: Art as Life takes the visitor on a journey through life at the Bauhaus, from its expressionist and ‘romantic’ origins in Weimar to the radical acceleration of cross-arts production at the school’s purpose-built second home in Dessau, through to subsequent direction under Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the final months in Berlin and beyond. The Exhibition presents a fresh look at the history of the school, its legacy and relevance to the arts and education today.
Gropius’s aim to encourage the ‘creative shaping of the processes of life’ and the school’s chief legacies of interdisciplinarity and experimentation guides the spirit of the exhibition. Focusing on the central tenets of Bauhaus educational theory and its pioneering integration of life, art and technology the Barbican exhibition brings together painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre and installation. While loosely chronological Bauhaus: Art as Life is structured thematically and explore subjects at the heart of the Bauhaus: life, society and the everyday, politics, people, colour, light, space and form. Exemplar works from such Bauhaus masters as Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Gunta Stölzl and Josef Albers will be presented alongside those by lesser-known artists including Lothar Schreyer, Gerhard Marcks, Theodor Bogler, Gertrud Arndt, Joost Schmidt, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, Xanti Schawinsky, Kurt Kranz and Roman Clemens.
Presenting areas unfamiliar to broader audiences the exhibition begins with esoteric works from the Weimar period, an era of Bauhaus history less charted until recently. Alongside explorations of colour theory and the ground-breaking preliminary course it considers such elements as play, wellbeing, spirituality and synaesthesia, and the nurturing of original creative thought within Bauhaus pedagogy. Women were central to Bauhaus history and the work of such figures as Marianne Brandt, Florence Henri, Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers, among others, will be brought to the fore.  Their work will not be presented individually but viewed throughout the exhibition’s thematic framework. Light, theatre and stage as catalysts of a multi-sensory and immersive human experience – as exemplified in the work of László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack – are integral to the presentation of the Bauhaus’s inter-disciplinary work and forms the basis of a dramatic, multi-sensory installation. Other areas of focus include the school’s commercial and promotional activities – from exhibition design and publishing to successful consumer products – and engagement with popular culture and modern modes of mass communication. The exhibition concludes with an examination of the international influence of the Bauhaus after Berlin.
To book your free place on the study visit please email the OCA: enquiries@oca-uk.com. Please note that this exhibition is just as relevant to art, photography, textiles or Visual Communications students. There are only 15 places and its first come first serve, though students who haven’t been on study visits before will be given some priority, so book up now! We plan to share email addresses between students who attend a study day. Please let us know if you are NOT happy to do this.