Barbican Art Gallery host the biggest Bauhaus exhibition in the UK in over forty years.
Bauhaus is design for life. Despite its mere fourteen years of existence, the German school spawned some of the most innovative and imaginative thinking in art and design post-WWI, and we’re still living with the results. With a sense of common purpose and the bettering of society in mind, students and teachers including Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy set about fashioning a better way of living. The results spanned art, design, craft and fashion, and embraced tradition as well as technology, rigor as well as experimentation. But it wasn’t all work – those Bauhausers also knew how to party. Visual culture today wouldn’t be the same without the Bauhaus design principles. Based as they were in a sense of idealism rather than commerce and with some absolutely stunning results, there’s still a lot to learn from this school of thought.
Bauhaus: Art as Life runs from 3rd May until 12th August 2012 at Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2Y 8DS.
Text, Camera & Editing: Laura Bushell
Stills Photography: Matthew Holder
Music: Jake Ridley
