The Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to present New Bauhaus in America, including works by György Kepes + László Moholy-Nagy, Arthur Siegel, M. Halberstadt, and Henry Holmes Smith. Starting this season with our September show, our exhibits will reflect the range of work that the gallery has exhibited and acquired during our 40 year history. In addition to commemorating the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the original Bauhaus school, our current New Bauhaus in America exhibition reflects our commitment to the avant-garde which emanated out of Europe. Starting with the Italian futurists, this inceptive avant-garde movement included work by the Bragaglia brothers. The gallery currently has two exceptionally rare and significant Bragaglia photographs on loan to SFMOMA for their current exhibition, Don’t! Photography and the Art of Mistakes.
The New Bauhaus, later the Institute of Design, remains influential for later generations of artists and significant for fostering experimental work across disciplines with few boundaries. György Kepes continuously experimented with process and media and is recognized as a progenitor of the merging of art and technology. Our New Bauhaus in America exhibition includes likely the most comprehensive and largest gallery exhibit of György Kepes’s work in decades, with 48 works, plus two collaborations with M. Halberstadt. Also included in this exhibition is work from others in the New Bauhaus milieu, including mixed media works by László Moholy-Nagy (gouache and ink on paper, serigraph on paper, and vintage photogram), along with photograms by Arthur Siegel, solarized photographs by M. Halberstadt, and experimental light and color abstractions by Henry Holmes Smith.
Our celebratory exhibition program continues in December with an exhibit of photographs by John Beasley Greene, active in the early 1850s. Greene remains one of the most significant landscape photographers, not only of the 19th century, but of the medium’s history to the present. Greene’s 19th century work introduced a distinctive and individual minimalist modern aesthetic that appears contemporary now. The first one-person museum exhibition, accompanied with the first monograph of John Beasley Greene’s work, recently opened at SFMOMA. This exhibition again includes work loaned by the Robert Koch Gallery.
