[May 27 2016]
‘Future-Present’ is the first US retrospective in nearly fifty years to present multi-disciplinary artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition starting on the 27th of May 2016 is an elaborate collection of artworks that has transformed the museum into a curiously engaging voyage for the senses. The foci of the show is to expose the viewer to the vast plethora of medium deployed by the artist bent on studying and tracing the inexhaustible possibilities intrinsic to light and the experience of objective reality.
For Moholy-Nagy, Abstract Constructivism in conjunction with the latest technologies, namely photography and film, along with the use of cutting edge materials such as plexiglass, opened up a possible and revolutionary way to re-signify the spatial character of registering light and shadow. As he argued the new ways of modulating, reflecting, mirroring and refracting light yield a pioneering ‘space articulation’ that would expose the seer to the experience of new ‘mixtures in the eyes’ as no painter could on the palette.
‘The Room of the Present’ is the most intimate bit of the show. Here the visitor enters an atmospheric space, an exhibition within the exhibition. The structure of the room is created by photographs, videos, sketches, paintings and text that are representational of historical instances, existential impressions and artistic movements that were essential to Moholy-Nagy’s oeuvre.
On view until September 7th, 2016, at Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Ave, New York.
Text Kinga Rajzak and photo Alexis Dahan
© Purple Institute