EL LISSITZKY. Der Neue Mensch, der Ansager, der Konstrukteur. Das Selbstbildnis als Kestner Gesellschaft

At breathtaking speed - EL LISSITZKY

What connects "Zabriskie Point", Michelangelo Antonioni's cult film of the 1970s, the student revolt and hippie movement, with El Lissitzky, and what connects BEASTER, Johanna Billing, Martin Boyce and all the other contemporary artists with his visions as an architect, designer, artist and photographer? One of the many answers is that through his revolutionary approach to art, space and typography, El Lissitzky (1890-1941) created an integration of visual elements into a dynamic and interactive readability of what is depicted. The breathtaking pace he set was linked to the "sound" of the 1920s, especially in Germany, where El Lissitzky had studied engineering at the Technical University in Darmstadt between 1909 and 1914, after being denied the opportunity to study at the art academy in St. Petersburg because he was Jewish. This explains his commute between Moscow, Berlin, Cologne, Zurich and Hanover, which led him to countless projects by and with Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Jan Tschichold and Willi Baumeister. He is not only regarded as one of the theoretical heads of Constructivism, who later taught at various Russian universities, but also published the art magazine "Gegenstand" with Ilya Ehrenburg in Berlin, collaborated on the "First Russian Art Exhibition" there in 1922, was artistic director of the Soviet pavilion at the 1928 press exhibition "Pressa" in Cologne and designed the section of Soviet artists for the Werkbund's "Film and Photo" exhibition in 1929. In Hanover, he had already designed the "Proun" portfolio, a portfolio of lithographs and collages, at the invitation of the Kestner Gesellschaft in 1923, which was followed by the commission to design the "Abstract Cabinet" for the Lower Saxony State Gallery in 1928/29. Proun is the abbreviation of "Pro Unowis" and stands for the "foundation of new forms in art". This means an unlimited and utopian space in which the structures float weightlessly and are defined not only by height, width and depth, but also by an abstract quantity, "time". The exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft, which is also a reminiscence of their great achievements and historical significance, was organised to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Proun and stands for the development of the international progressive new art movements, which artists such as El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters associate with the name of the Kestner Gesellschaft in the same breath. Katja Strunz picks up on this when she says: "My work revolves around the interweaving of time, space and movement. The phenomenon of falling and folding runs through all my works and metaphorically stands for a compression of space and time, the collapse of the here and there, the now and then. I am interested in how change manifests itself spatially and temporally and which processes trigger transformations. I want to capture a moment in time through the rhythm of unfolding and folding." From a contemporary perspective, she thus summarises the important impulse that emanates from El Lissitzky's oeuvre as a whole and at the same time provides the connection for the exhibition from summer 2023 at the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover, which this book now actually documents.

Artists: Michelangelo Antonioni, Willi Baumeister, BEASTER, Johanna Billing, Martin Boyce, Max Buchartz, Heinrich Dunst, the next ENTERprise, Fernanda Fragateiro, Assaf Gruber, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Lajos Kassák, Marlena Kudlicka, Marysia Lewandowska, El Lissitzk, Felipe Mujica, Lászloó Moholy-Nagy, Paulina Ołowska, Peter László Peri, Prinz Gholam, Florian Pumhösl, Susanne Sachsse, Wieland Schönfelder, Kurt Schwitters, Katja Strunz, Nikolai Michailowitsch Suetin