Bauhaus100. Programme For The Now – Contemporary Viewpoints

It was exactly 100 years ago that the Bauhaus in Weimar opened its doors in 1919 as an educational and training institution under the management of Walter Gropius. The anniversary is celebrated across the world with spectacular exhibitions. As a movement, the Bauhaus was the most influential resource and milestone in the history of modern art, while also functioning as an art workshop and a reform school. Its ideals and practices have inspired countless subsequent art movements and tendencies, but its original program offered even more: a comprehensive aesthetic reform of life from the quotidian to the arts.

The exhibition at the Ludwig Museum is part of the international series of events commemorating the Bauhaus Centenary. The exhibition introduces the activity of the Bauhaus in thematic groups (e.g. colour theory, esotery, vision/utopia, object design, light art, etc.), encompassed by its history of ideas and reception history through a selection of works by mainly contemporary artists. Programme for the Now is an experiment offering the reinterpretation of this unparalleled modernist utopia, as well as retrospection and recollection from a contemporary perspective. The centenary is also a perfect occasion to review the workshop’s impact on 20th century and present-day art, and on culture as such. The concept and programme, or we might say, approach of the Bauhaus lived on throughout the past hundred years, although radically transformed in adapting to the requirements of each consecutive period, and it emerges in today’s visual culture with renewed content.

This exhibition is not an introduction into the history of the Bauhaus – above all, it is meant to present those distinctive, ever-present artistic positions in which the effect of the Bauhaus approach can be discovered. Besides the original ideas and works evoked by pictures, objects and references, the exhibition is an array of associated works by almost fifty contemporary artists.

Curators: Julia FABÉNYI, József KÉSZMAN, Zsuzsanna PETRÓ

The exhibition is organised in cooperation with Budapest Spring Festival.