Galerie Gregor Staiger is happy to current the second exhibition of works by the Swiss artist Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky (born 1904 in Basel, died 1979 in Locarno). Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky was born to a Jewish household of Polish descent in Basel in 1904. He was a part of the primary technology of artists to review on the Bauhaus, the place he enrolled in 1924. His lecturers and later pals included essential artists equivalent to Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. His essential contributions there have been within the theater division along with Oskar Schlemmer; he wrote performs, created units and costumes, and carried out. The exhibition exhibits a small number of Schawinsky’s early works from the Nineteen Twenties to the Forties. Between 1933 and 1936, Schawinsky lived in Milan, the place he labored as a business artist for the legendary Studio Boggeri along with his personal inventive work.
Marked by the spirit of the Bauhaus, the place the artist studied within the Nineteen Twenties, and of the Black Mountain Faculty (USA), the place he taught within the latter half of the Nineteen Thirties, Schawinsky’s work is characterised by its multidisciplinary nature: theatre, scenography, images, graphic design, portray and typography are among the many fields the artist explored throughout a profession spanning six many years. Formally various and guided by fixed experimentation, Schawinsky’s work bears shut and diverse connections with essential actions of pre- and post-war modernism in the US and Europe—the continent the artist left to flee Nazism and fascism in 1936, and the place he returned to within the Sixties. His apply is emblematic of the transatlantic inventive exchanges sparked by the Second World Conflict that left an enduring impression on artwork historical past, of which Schawinsky was a key participant.
In 1924, on the age of twenty, Xanti Schawinsky started his research on the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Based in 1919 by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was a multidisciplinary faculty that’s now thought-about one of many essential hubs of structure, visible arts, theatre and design within the twentieth century and one of many birthplaces of contemporary artwork and the avant-garde actions. Amongst Schawinsky’s lecturers had been painter Paul Klee (1879–1940), architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). On the Bauhaus, which moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Schawinsky was primarily concerned within the theatre workshop led by Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943). It was right now that Schawinsky started to work on his idea of ‘Spectodrama’—a forerunner of whole theatre—and it was not lengthy earlier than he additionally introduced his experiments to the stage. The broad themes that may be current in his future work may already be seen right here in an embryonic kind, particularly the elaboration
of dramatic areas and a priority with the connection between man and machine. Parallel to his research, his stage experimentations and his work, Schawinsky devoted a part of his time to his ardour for music, enjoying the saxophone within the Bauhaus orchestra. In 1926, he labored for one season as a set designer on the municipal theatre in Zwickau (Germany). Upon his return to the Bauhaus in 1927, he gave programs primarily based on the sensible expertise he had gained there.
After assaults by the Nationwide Socialist press started in 1931 and a wave of political arrests ensued, Schawinsky fled Germany in 1933. He went first to Switzerland, the place he labored in Zurich and Ascona, earlier than persevering with to Milan later that 12 months. There, he made a residing primarily as a graphic designer. Along with his revolutionary, Bauhaus-influenced strategy to typography and images, Schawinsky contributed to the renewal of visible promoting in Italy. Throughout this era, he additionally created a number of typefaces, a few of which have since been digitised (for instance, beneath the title Xanti32)1. Quite a few commissions for Studio Boggeri—for manufacturers equivalent to Cinzano, Motta, Sanpellegrino and Olivetti—introduced him recognition and business success. Throughout the identical interval, he additionally created a small group of works that may be learn within the spirit of Bauhaus but in addition of Pittura Metafisica. Nevertheless, because the Italian fascists moved nearer to Nazi Germany, he was additionally compelled to flee Milan in 1936. His good friend Anni and Josef Albers invited him to show at Black Mountain Faculty in North Carolina, the place the concepts of the emigrated European modernists had been additional developed.
In 1938, Schawinsky left North Carolina for New York to work as a graphic designer and portray trainer at New York College and Metropolis Faculty. A 12 months later, he turned an American citizen. In early Forties New York, Schawinsky was confronted with the conflict, each immediately and not directly. As a designer, he created camouflage patterns for the U.S. Air Drive, however the conflict additionally influenced his inventive manufacturing. His best-known collection of works from this era, exhibited in the US and overseas within the Forties and Fifties, is probably going Faces of Conflict (1942). Combining watercolour and drawing, these works on paper bear titles evoking numerous army ranks and capabilities (The Admiral, The Normal, The Soldieretc.).Theydepictfacescomposedofweaponsandmilitaryequipment,setagainst backgrounds with color gradients paying homage to Schawinsky’s promoting designs and summary, camouflage-like patterns. These brightly colored and unsettling machine-men convey a deeply ambivalent imaginative and prescient of conflict and are a direct response to contemporaneous political occasions, which is uncommon in Schawinsky’s work.
—Raphael Gygax
at Galerie Gregor Staiger, Milano
till April 6, 2025
