László Moholy-Nagy – Kunst des Lichts

'Through formal and spatial connection, our eye completes the received optical phenomenon with our intellectual experience to create an image-concept, while the photographic apparatus reproduces the purely optical image and therefore shows the recordings, distortions, shortenings and so forth that are preserved in the optical.'

László Moholy-Nagy

The Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin is currently showing a great selection of paintings, photographs (black-and-white and colour), photograms, collages, films and graphics by the artist and Bauhaus school professor, László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946).

The exhibition Art of Light illuminates the years in which Moholy-Nagy developed a theory of light that he first set down in writing in 1925 in an essay entitled 'Painting, Photography, Film'. In this essay, he draws on the etymological significance of the word photography, meaning 'writing with light'. Moholy-Nagy states that the photograph can never catch the real light; it always refers to the gap that exists between the perception of real time and the photographic vision. Film, therefore, consists of a series of moving images created through light projections.

More info: www.berlinerfestspiele.de  

László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), 22

Until January 16, 2011