Oskar Schlemmer – The Bauhaus and the path to modernity

The Ducal Museum in Gotha invites you to embark on a journey of discovery in 2019 and to immerse yourself in the art and the thinking of Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus movement from one hundred years ago.

Oskar Schlemmer (1888 – 1943) is one of the most versatile artists the modern world has known. He worked as a painter, draughtsman, graphic artist, sculptor, stage designer, and muralist, choreographed dance projects, and was also an author. In all of these different forms of artistic expression, one substantive aspect of his creativity is central time and again: his vision of a future in which modern human beings would live in harmony with technical and social innovation. He expected art to contribute decisively towards achieving this and to play a transformative role in society. The crucial questions that Schlemmer interrogated in this regard – questions that also occupied the minds of other avant-garde artists – have lost little of their urgency today.

The 2019 centenary of the foundation of the Bauhaus is an event of international significance and will be celebrated in numerous events and exhibitions all over Germany. Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha will join in the celebrations marking this year of commemoration by dedicating its special exhibition in this year to one of the most important Bauhaus masters. The Gotha exhibition, which will be the first monographic exhibition of Schlemmer’s work in the new German federal states, will endeavour to make the sheer expressive variety of Schlemmer’s work visible. Its chief focus will be on his work from the 1920s and 1930s. This includes Schlemmer’s time at the Bauhaus school in Weimar and subsequently in Dessau, his work as a muralist, and his stage and dance projects. (Re-)situating human beings in a changing society is a substantive aspect fundamental to Schlemmer’s work – and an issue that is not foreign to present-day stressed human beings in this age of social media, digital natives and the like. The Ducal Museum in Gotha invites you to embark on a journey of discovery in 2019 and to immerse yourself in the art and the thinking of Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus movement from one hundred years ago.