One of the most anticipated design exhibitions of this season: Marianne Brand: Metall, at Ulrich Fiedler in Berlin.
Marianne Brandt (1893–1983), the German artist is mostly known for the work she had done in metal during her time as a student and later as the head of the Metal Workshop at the Bauhaus. She was able to translate what she leaned from her modernist teachers — Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy — into the most exquisite, simple forms, created for industrial production (even though most of her work never entered production). Her vocabulary has been so influential, that it has left its mark on the entire modern movement well into the 60s.
With an attitude of an industrial designer, when Brandt became the workshop’s acting director, she negotiated some of the most important Bauhaus contracts for collaborations with industry, resulted in lights and other metal workshop designs, and by that, she made a contribution to funding the school. Her legacy was somewhat tarnished, when in 1939, she joined the Reichskulturkammer, the Nazi regime’s official artists’ organization.
Fiedler, the world’s expert on early German modernist design will be showing the rarest of the rare: from the Weimar time; a ceiling lamp created in 1928; a group of metalware, designed for a collaboration with Gotha Company Ruppelwerke; and photographers. The show will be open until June 23rd. All images courtesy Ulrich Fiedler.
