Hungarian-American modernist designer György Kepes’ contribution to postwar modernism would be the focus of György Kepes. Interthinking Artwork + Science, a brand new documentary movie by Márton Orosz.
In October 1941, Chicago’s Katharine Kuh Gallery assembled a big exhibition on trendy graphic design and its relationship with commerce. The exhibit The Advance Guard of Promoting Artists was developed alongside László Moholy-Nagy and Kepes; for the primary time it introduced collectively 9 American and European progressives together with Frank Barr, Herbert Bayer, Lester Beall, Kepes (who designed the exhibition catalog), E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Matter, Moholy-Nagy, Paul Rand and Ladislav Sutnar.
Kepes was greater than an artist, graphic designer and writer, he was the hyperlink between science and visible matter. He taught on the New Bauhaus in 1943 and later at Brooklyn School, the place his college students included Saul Bass. “He modified my life,” Bass stated. “He turned me round and I grew to become a designer due to him. He opened the door for me that brought on me to grasp design and artwork in one other means. He’s a very impressed trainer. It’s uncommon {that a} man will be each an artist and a trainer, and carry out fantastically as each.”
Orosz’s movie explores Kepes by means of questions that proceed to vex designers and scientists at this time: Can know-how save us from know-how itself? Can prosthetics be used to emulate the pageantry of nature and supply a viable different for constructing a sustainable world? Orosz describes his topic as a person “with the scientist’s mind, the poet’s coronary heart and the painter’s eye,” insisting that Kepes is a forgotten precursor of media artwork.
Kepes was among the many first to make use of the time period “visible tradition” as an impartial analysis topic in a up to date sense. Because the architect of the sunshine workshop on the New Bauhaus/College of Design in Chicago in 1937 and the founder and first director of the Heart for Superior Visible Research at MIT in 1967, his mission was to introduce highly effective new instruments to “intersee” and “interthink” information on a participatory foundation. It proved to be the muse of a program that outlined the aesthetic company of the ecological consciousness lengthy earlier than these ideas had been melded collectively, giving him a pioneering function within the historical past of the Artwork and Know-how Motion.
The MIT premiere of the movie begins at 7 p.m. on Oct. 21 in Cambridge.
