Cabinet Piece: Small Worlds – Avant-garde Prints and Drawings

10 September 2016 – 8 January 2017

Wassily Kandinsky produced ‘Small Worlds’, his most important album of prints, in the year of his appointment to a teaching position at the State Bauhaus in Weimar. Through a combination of gestural and geometrical formal elements, he succeeded in uniting his expressionist roots with the spirit of constructivism that was already sweeping through the Weimar Bauhaus. Hovering completely free in the pictorial spaces, the individual forms enter into tension-filled relationships so that each of the compositions seems to depict its own separate small world. Print and drawing techniques also offered other avant-garde artists the possibility of giving shape to their notions of dynamic and simultaneously balanced new worlds through wholly abstract means. The Cabinet Piece show ‘Small Worlds’ features works on paper by artists such as Alexander Bogomazow, Max Burchartz, Theo van Doesburg, László Moholy-Nagy and Lyubov Popova.

Curator: Nina Schallenberg