Zentrum Paul Klee Bern Gegründet von Maurice E. und Martha Müller sowie den Erben Paul Klee
Digitales Angebot 14.10.2021 – 14.10.2021

International Dialogues in Experimental Design

Donnerstag 14. Oktober 2021 18:00

Zur Ausstellung «max bill global»

In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

Eine internationale Zoom-Diskussion zu experimentellen Schulen für Kunst und Design in Europa und Lateinamerika, in englischer Sprache.

In addition to his productive exchanges with visual artists in Latin America and globally, Max Bill (Swiss, 1908–1994) was an influential designer, architect, and educator whose work included cofounding Germany’s Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, or Ulm School of Design, in 1953—one of the many institutions that continued and expanded upon the theories of the Bauhaus worldwide.

This panel will examine the development of new teaching strategies, art schools, and design philosophies during the second half of the twentieth century, considering how the Bauhaus inspired various approaches in Europe and the Americas. The participants will explore the evolution and cross-pollination of experimental design concepts across geographical, social, and political contexts, and their lasting impact.

In their presentations, panelists Julian Bittiner, Liz Donato, and Aleca Le Blanc will discuss the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm in Germany, the Valparaíso School of architecture in Chile, and the relationship between concrete art and design in Argentina and Brazil. Their talks will be introduced by Francesca Ferrari and followed by a conversation moderated by Fabienne Eggelhöfer.

This program is organized in conjunction with max bill global at the Zentrum Paul Klee and “From Surface to Space”: Max Bill and Concrete Sculpture in Buenos Aires at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). It will be conducted in English on Zoom.

Register here

A recording will be published on ISLAA’s website after the program takes place.

For information about the related panel Recasting Concretism: New Looks at Max Bill in Latin America, organized by The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and ISLAA on October 21, please visit this link.

About the speakers
Julian Bittiner is an independent designer based in New York, originally from Geneva, Switzerland. His typographically inflected studio practice centers on an investigation of formal contrasts and contradictions, between typologies and the “singularity of things,” professionalism and amateurism, abstract systems and the ad hoc. He received a BFA in fine art from Art Center College of Design in 1995 and an MFA in graphic design from the Yale School of Art in 2008. Collaborating closely with artists, curators, and institutions on a variety of projects, commissions have come from Jonathan Berger, Sam Contis, Anoka Faruqee, Logan Grider, Mary Reid Kelley, Michael Stipe, Adams and Ollman gallery, ART PAPERS, the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University, New York University’s 80WSE Gallery, and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. His work has been published and exhibited internationally. Bittiner has served as a faculty member at the Yale School of Art since 2008 and is currently senior critic and assistant director of graphic design studies.

Liz Donato holds a PhD in art history from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specialized in modern and contemporary art and architecture in Latin America. Her research examines intersections between visual and literary modernisms in the Southern Cone, expanded poetics, and experimental pedagogies. She completed her dissertation on the ephemeral actions of the Valparaíso School of architecture in 2019. She is currently the research specialist at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she manages the Documents Project digital archive. Previously, she was the Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017–18), and an instructor at the City College of New York, Parsons School of Design, and the Cooper Union.

Fabienne Eggelhöfer has been chief curator and head of collection, exhibitions, and research at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, since 2017. From 2005 to 2017, she was curator of modern and contemporary art at the Zentrum Paul Klee where she realized numerous temporary exhibitions and collection displays. In 2012 she completed a research project on Paul Klee’s teaching at the Bauhaus that culminated in an online database on Klee’s teaching notes and the exhibition Paul Klee: Bauhaus Master at the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Fundación Juan March.

Francesca Ferrari is a PhD candidate at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in art history and English from the Université de Lausanne. Her research and publications focus on twentieth-century European and Latin American art. Her doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “Animated Geometries,” explores the convergence of geometric abstraction, the human body, and movement on a transnational scale during the 1920s. She has received fellowships from the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin; and the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Aleca Le Blanc is a scholar of modernism, specializing in Latin American art and architecture with a focus on Brazil, and an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her scholarship addresses paradigms of abstraction, institutional histories, and global modernisms. She is currently at work on a book entitled Concrete and Steel: Artists in Industrial Brazil, in which she considers how a young avant-garde generation in Brazil’s cosmopolitan centers reimagined their relationship to the rapidly modernizing society in which they found themselves. She was co-curator of the exhibition Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection at the Getty Museum (2017).

In Zusammenarbeit mit
ISLAA