Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War (2014)

This catalogue offers “a look at first generation Bauhaus artist Alexander ‘Xanti’ Schawinsky’s oeuvre, which encompasses a range of social and political investigations. Schawinsky played a key role in the school’s vital social life and was a member of the Bauhaus Band. He studied graphic design and experimental photography and was also deeply engaged in the Bauhaus’s theater workshop as an actor, set and costume designer, creator of performances, and teacher.

The exhibition catalogue focuses on two bodies of work Schawinsky made between 1941 and 1946, Faces of War and the Head Drawings. The former are man-machine hybrids that could represent either an aggressive enemy or a powerful avenger—or perhaps an identity that encompasses both. The Faces of War break from the utopian optimism of the early Bauhaus and reveal the existential struggle of an artist coping with identity and the devastation of war. The Head Drawings allowed Schawinsky to literally remake his own “portrait” out of such detritus of the natural world as thread, crystals, rope, and rocks.”

Introduction by Brett Littman
Essays by Michael Bracewell and Juliet Koss
Publisher The Drawing Center, New York, 2014
Drawing Papers series, 119
ISBN 9780942324891
120 pages

Publisher

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