Location and time:
German Consulate General
871 United Nations Plaza
New York, NY 10017
Opening reception: Thursday, May 9, 2019, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Exhibition: May 9 –June 27, 2019
Admission is free, but an RSVP is required for the opening reception at: Bauhaus in Balance
Bauhaus in Balance – Exercises in Body and Mind Calibration
With: Jenny Brockmann, Torsten Blume and Materials from the historical Bauhaus
Curated by Janek Müller
What can we learn about the utopian desire for balance and equilibrium by looking at the fragile sculptures from the famous preliminary course of the Bauhaus school? A sculpture from Bauhaus student Gerda Marx, created in 1928, is one example for the studies in balance undertaken at the Bauhaus.
Things, objects, architectural designs, their social lives and their energies were supposed to harmonize with each other and the world. The Bauhaus can be understood as a “school of balance”. In the Bauhaus-precourse, students developed studies in balance that moved in space; swinging and oscillating.
In its few years of existence, the Bauhaus was a center as well as an object of debates of construction and matter and the always ambivalent struggle for balance: adjusting and stabilizing, heating and cooling, balancing and poising. Dancing instructor Gertrud Grunow gave “lessons in harmony” to let students find their inner balance with the help of rhythm and color.
The exhibition Bauhaus in Balance presents – in addition to some historical material – two artistic and creative perspectives. As an artist, choreographer and art historian Torsten Blume deals with the transformation of the “appearance” of the human, the artist, sculptor and researcher Jenny Brockmann asks in her work “Gertrud Grunow” for the inner and hidden factors of human creative being.
The exhibition is part of a research project entitled “Apparatus of the Heat and Cold,” developed by the curators Janek Müller und Niklas Hofmann-Walbeck for the centenary of the Bauhaus’s founding in 1919, supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and KUNSTFEST WEIMAR.
Texts by Paulina Olszewska, Torsten Blume, Janek Müller, Ines Weizman, Hartmut Böhme, Sophie Grobler, Katja Erfurth, Sophia Gräfe, Adrian Palko
Bauhaus in Balance – Exercises in Body and Mind Calibration is also supported by the Deutsches Haus at NYU.
