“Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective” (July 12th, 2024 – January 5th, 2025) is the first retrospective devoted to Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky (Basel, 1904 – Locarno, 1979) outside his native Switzerland. Curated by Raphael Gygax, the exhibition – hosted by Mudam in Luxembourg and organized in collaboration with the Estate Xanti Schawinsky – offers an exhaustive overview of the extremely rich, heterogeneous and multifaceted creative activity of a figure whose simple association with the Bauhaus school may appear, perhaps, a little too reductive and limiting. Working by contrasts, the conventionality inherent in the choice of adopting an exhibition layout based on a chronological criterion averts the risk of digression and allows Schawinsky’s richness, experimentation and creative metamorphosis to detonate without limitations.
View of the exhibition “Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective”, 12.07.2024 – 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
The desire to rediscover a figure who was so significant for the progress of 20th century art, as well as inspiring for the contemporary scene, is further confirmed in the words of Mudam director Bettina Steinbrügge: «The work of Schawinsky has influenced a number of trends that are now at the heart of contemporary art, including performance, multimedia and cross-disciplinary art. He can be seen as an important reference for a new generation of artists and for our understanding of the foundations of contemporary art». Added to this is the fact that most of the works in the exhibition had never been exhibited since Schawinsky died in 1979.
View of the exhibition “Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective”, 12.07.2024 – 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
It is his Bauhaus years (1924 – 1929) that open the retrospective, a period in which he mainly devoted himself to theatrical activity with Oskar Schlemmer and the definition of the pioneering “Spectodrama”, forerunners of a form of “total theatre” as well as precursors of the more recent “happenings”. A preparatory drawing for the painting “Stepptänzer versus Steppmaschine” (1924) highlights Schawinsky’s visionary ability to question the still embryonic man-machine relationship. The machine on show was inspired by the one used in the 1926 performance “Feminine Repetition”, which featured Schawinsky himself as a tap dancer, together with the machine he designed. The richness of the Swiss artist’s theatrical experimentation lives on in a nucleus of works that synthesise as far as possible his way of seeing and interpreting such a field. “Spectodrama – Illusion des Körperlichen 1 und 2” (1926) presents one of the settings used in performances during the Bauhaus years. The use of simplified and essential forms, as a reference to the human figure, with which the actors interacted grotesquely, testifies to the extent to which the ideological influences of the Weimar academy took root in Schawinsky’s work in the wake of the motto “Art and technology: a new unity”.
View of the exhibition “Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective”, 12.07.2024 – 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
Depth of vision and a surprising sense of topicality emerge from a scene immortalised from the 1928 play “Olga Olga”, defined as the high point of Schawinsky’s theatrical activity during the Bauhaus years, extolling its qualities of absolute interpretative freedom, fluidity and anticipation of a performative action not yet properly recognised as an effective art form. The three performers – Oskar Schlemmer, Herman Röseler and Schawinsky himself – are caught in a state of Dadaistic improvisation, in a surreal setting that cannot be pigeonholed into simplistic interpretative or genre labels. Aesthetic and documentary value find perfect synchrony in the evidence of Schawinsky’s years first in Switzerland and later in Milan (1933 – 1936) as a graphic designer. In addition to the works for Illy Café and Olivetti, the cover created for the illustrated magazine “Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia” is also presented, proving the forced connivance but also the difficulty in conceiving the way Schawinsky dealt with the period of fascist repression.
View of the exhibition “Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective”, 12.07.2024 – 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
The essential years of his stay at the Black Mountain Collage (1936 – 1938), where he was invited by Joseph Albers to hold the “Stage Studies” programme, saw the continuation and further development of the “Spectodrama” concept initiated during the Bauhaus years. The testimonies presented exalt a sense of pure avant-garde and propensity for the advancement of the theatrical discipline. Conceived as a form of didactic theatre, the performative material was contaminated and enriched with studies related to the movement of the body in space, the use of sound, colour or light related to different fields. Looking at it all in parallel with Agnieszka Kurant’s solo exhibition[1] also hosted by the museum, one finds, in some respects, a similar “thirst for knowledge” and an urge not to get caught up in any kind of academically defined disciplinary boundary with the intention, instead, of turning one’s gaze towards as yet unexplored horizons. It was based on the same creative need that he devoted himself to painting in the period from 1949 to 1979. Obviously, in this case too, to go beyond what had been done so far, culminating in studies on the use of the body as the main instrument of the painting process, also expanding the extension of the performative dimension in another direction.
View of the exhibition “Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective”, 12.07.2024 – 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
In the same years, he experimented in the search for alternatives to the use of painting. Simply astonishing, the “Track Paintings” on display were created from the 1950s onwards using machines with which Schawinsky drove directly above the composition in a clear substitution of human gestures with the artificial component. This can also be seen in his “Light Paintings” (1950) in which he exploited the effects of light on photosensitive paper to replicate the expressiveness of brushstrokes, while with the “Smoke Paintings” (1964) he focused on the use of smoke as a creative element with indefinable and uncontrollable results. In Schawinsky’s work, therefore, the corners of the concept of authorship are progressively smoothed out, always in the direction of a pictorial renewal that finds theoretical synthesis in his essay “About the Physical in Painting” (1969).
View of the exhibition “Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective”, 12.07.2024 – 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
As explained, the new era into which painting was to enter entailed an overcoming of the opposition between abstraction and figuration to search for new creative paths through a change in the relative working tools and their use. In this sense, the “Eclipses” series from the 1960s, characterised by crumpled sheets and painted with an airbrush, resulting in abstract compositions that were unintentional in their final form. Finally, the “Sphere Paintings” (begun in 1967), with which Schawinsky gave a three-dimensional quality to the pictorial space by placing one or more layers of painted gauze on the background support, close the exhibition. The perceptive act of the observer thus undergoes a further stimulus through a geometric configuration and optical illusion aimed at recalling both the studies linked to the Bauhaus years and a desire to render matter and energy in their fundamental state in line with the growing interest in quantum physics in those years.
[1] https://www.juliet-artmagazine.com/en/agnieszka-kurant-risk-landscape-2/
Info:
Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective
12/07/2024 – 05/01/2025
Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3, Park Dräi Eechelen
L-1499 Luxembourg-Kirchberg
www.mudam.com
With a specialist degree in Economics and Management of Cultural Heritage, passionate about the field of Contemporary art, its economic dimension and, more generally, the dynamics characterizing the art market, Gabriele has gained experience over time in contexts such as contemporary art galleries, start-ups and Art Advisory. He currently works in the Art-Rite auction house as an assistant in the department of Modern and Contemporary art.
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