György Kepes: First solo show at Tate Liverpool

Tate Liverpool
6th March - 31st May 2015

By Pippa Jane Wielgos

György Kepes' first solo show at Tate Liverpool presents over 81 experimental photographic works comprising of 'camera-less' photograms, photography and photo-montages during his teaching in Chicago in the late 30's and 40's.

The interdisciplinary works that bridge painting, photography, bring together science, technology, contemporary culture and art theory written about by Kepes in his six edited anthologies known as "Vision & Value" (1944), which he wrote during his role as Professor of Colour and Light at the New Bauhaus in Chicago that asserted the avant garde view that "visual language is capable of disseminating knowledge more effectively than almost any other vehicle communication".

His imagery and techniques of 'painting with light' promoted a cross-disciplinary debate that emphasised the increasing importance of science and technology which Kepes said that he wanted to go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge, and create new models of representation, to which Kepes is attributed as being one of the pivotal proponents of the Bauhaus tradition.

Abstract and pictorially deconstructive, his works explore organic, industrial form and a confluence of modernist and photographic experimental influences and techniques interpretive of the rise of European modernism, derived from his politicized Hungarian roots, and his experience fleeing the totalitarianism of the Third Reich and what he referred to as "the inhumane conditions of Hungarian peasantry".

György Kepes, Lily and Egg c. 1939

Born in Selyp in Hungary (Budapest) in 1906, he trained as a painter at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Budapest), where he graduated in 1928. After training as a painter during his formative years he temporarily worked in Berlin as a film maker and designed the dust jacket for Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim's book "Film also Kunst" ("Film as Art").

On invitation by Walter Gropius in 1930, he joined the Bauhaus design studio of László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, who at the time was considered at the forefront of experimentation with light and moving imagery. Between them they formed a dynamic partnership.

When Moholy-Nagy fled Nazi Germany in 1935, Kepes followed him, first to Amsterdam, then to London and, finally, Chicago, where they founded a new short-lived Bauhaus design school.

In the U.S. Kepes worked as an educator at the New Bauhaus in Chicago where he taught between 1937-43 where he ran the Colour and Light department and at the Centre of Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), being the which he founded in 1967 and where remained until 1974.

The outcome of their theories were written about in 1930s in “Form + Code,” by Mr. Reas and Chandler McWilliams, of the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Dutch design group LUST.

György Kepes, Hand on Black Ground c. 1939-40

Fully aware of the interdisciplinary potential of painting and the uses of experimental photography in Europe and America, Kepes took full advantage of the potential to create his own personal modernist idiom. Bringing science, art and technology together, he made experimental works that deconstructed representation to he simplest elements of abstraction that investigated form function (organic and industrial), that also wrote about in 'Graphic Forms : Art as Related to the Book" 1949; "Arts Environment" 1972; "The Visual Arts Today" 1960. In recognition of his achievements, there is a Kepes Visual Centre in Eger, Hungary. In 1973 he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1978 and died in 2001.

His art theories and understanding of visual organisation and “new” technologies of photography, cinema and television on visual culture, which he wrote about in "Language of Vision" in 1942, led to Kepes (amongst with other artists such as Moholy-Nagy), to be asked by the U.S. Army to advice on military and civilian camouflage.

Several of his students, such as Saul Bass in films by Stanley Kubrick, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese introduced his avant garde ideas to a mass audience.

The Tate who hold forty photographs and two paintings of Kepes' work can also be seen at the Tate St Ives "The Modern Lens : International Photography and the Tate Collection. His work and role in art and design research is considered important he made between art, design and science.

György Kepes is programmed in parallel with special exhibitions, Leonora Carrington and Cathy Wilkes as part of Tate Liverpool's spring season, Surreal Landscapes. Together they are three artists who, working in different periods, are variously connected by motifs alluding to invented worlds, domestic objects and settings, an interest in assemblage and a sense of mystery. The exhibition coincides with LOOK/15, Liverpool International Photography Festival (15 May - 31 June 2015).

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