Play, Life, Illusion. Xanti Schawinsky
In the organizer's words:
And Monster Chetwynd "Xanti Shenanigans"
From March 15 to June 15, 2025, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld is presenting the first comprehensive retrospective of the early Bauhaus artist Alexander "Xanti" Schawinsky (1904-1979) in Germany for over 35 years. The exhibition will be complemented by an installation and performance by British artist Monster Chetwynd (*1973), which references Schawinsky's work.
Under the title "Play, Life, Illusion", the exhibition presents the multidisciplinary work of Swiss-American artist Xanti Schawinsky in all its breadth with over 100 paintings, photographs, stage designs, drawings and design graphics. The exhibition contributes to the rediscovery of Schawinsky's long inaccessible oeuvre, as the majority of the works are being presented for the first time since the artist's death in 1979. The exhibition was realized in cooperation with the Mudam Luxembourg - Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, where it was already on display from 12.07.2024 to 05.01.2025.
Xanti Schawinsky, born in Basel in 1904, was a central figure at the Bauhaus, where he worked with artists such as Oskar Schlemmer:Inside such as Oskar Schlemmer, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, he studied and created numerous stage and costume designs, produced collages and photographs and pioneered the idea of 'spectodrama', a new form of theater in which, in his own words, he wanted to combine "color and form, movement and light, sound and word, pantomime and music, graphics and improvisation". After Hitler came to power in 1933, Schwawinsky emigrated as a Jewish artist, first to Italy and then to the USA in 1936. There he taught at Black Mountain College and became one of the most important representatives of transatlantic artistic exchange. Driven by great formal diversity and experimental curiosity, Schawinsky became involved in some of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century and left his mark on them. His radical attitude towards the performative and process-based expansion of art still has an influence on young art today.
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