100 years of bauhaus I

The organist, reform pedagogue, and painter Alfred Ehrhardt (1901–1984) got to know the Bauhaus masters Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger in Dessau during the winter semester of 1928–29 and integrated their subjects, techniques, and instructional methods into his teaching activities at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg. In 1931, his artistic work was presented in a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. It was the only exhibition of his paintings during his lifetime, before he turned to photography and film as a result of his dismissal from his university teaching position by the National Socialists. Ehrhardt summarized his teaching experiences in the book Gestaltungslehre (1932), where he described the significance of physical material as “a living, expressive condition [...] in an organic sense, i.e. in a creative sense.” He wanted to develop a “material sensitivity” that would allow him to grasp the visual and tactile qualities of the structure, texture, and physical composition of various materials intuitively and apply these artistically in accordance with their own strengths. His abstract compositions, created in tempera on masonite, elucidate the “material sensitivity” that Ehrhardt acquired through a focused study of nature’s manifestations and laws. Using various tools such as spatulas or the tip of his brush to create his paintings, he incorporated the structure of the painting ground, producing an interplay of filigree line frameworks and impasto color surfaces. Only on occasion can a concrete figuration in his painted “collages” be made out from the geometric elements, such as a Paul Klee-like standing figure, or a Kandinsky-esque cosmic landscape. In other works, Ehrhardt draws on his reserve of animal motifs, presented in a highly simplified form throughout his overall body of work.

Curators: Stefanie Odenthal M.A. and Dr. Christiane Stahl