Wendt Gallery to Host Major Art Exhibition Featuring Bauhaus Movement Artists

Laguna Beach, CA, March 23, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Wendt Modern is pleased to announce the opening of their new exhibition Champions of Modernism III on view from May 9th thru July 15th, 2009. The exhibition will be open for public viewing Thursday thru Monday from 10am to 5pm, and a 48-page exhibition catalog will be made available for $35.00. The exhibition will be co-curated by Serina Manqueros, owner, and Steven Lowy, an independent curator from New York City who for 20 years has been the curator of the Estate of Rudolf Bauer.

The opening reception will take place on Saturday, May 9th from 6pm to 9pm. Cocktails and hors d'oeuvres will be served, and guests will enjoy live entertainment. If you would like to attend or would like more information, please call (949) 497-4292, or email champions@wendtgallery.com. The opening reception is RSVP only.

Champions of Modernism III will feature 85 works by 11 modernist artists from the early 1900’s to the present. One of the highlights of the exhibition, Con Brio 4, painted by Rudolf Bauer in 1917, is a key work from the period. Bauer came to renown in the early twentieth century first as a celebrated caricaturist and then through exhibitions at Der Sturm in Berlin, an important art gallery and school in Germany (like the Bauhaus in Dessau) whose exhibitors also included Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc and Hilla Rebay. Bauer and Rebay met at der Sturm and fell in love.

The Wendt Gallery exhibition follows Bauer and Rebay into the 1930's, as Rebay emigrates to the U.S., becomes Solomon Guggenheim’s art advisor, and helps establish Bauer as the copper magnate’s favorite artist. In her new role as advisor, Rebay discovers the work of Canadian born artist Rolph Scarlett (later known as the American Kandinsky) and appoints him chief lecturer at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the forerunner of the Guggenheim Museum, which Rebay co-founded. Bauer’s work is included in the infamous “Degenerate Art Show” in Munich in 1937. Soon afterwards Bauer was imprisoned in a Berlin jail for eight months. He was finally rescued from Gestapo detention through extraordinary efforts by Rebay & Guggenheim. Five of his ‘prison drawings’ will be included in the Champions of Modernism III exhibition.

Another artist who fled both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was Xanti Schawinsky, a Bauhaus student and theatre instructor. Schawinsky, also an award winning graphic designer, was an energetic artist and great experimenter who made paintings with everything from his own dancing feet to a Triumph TR3 automobile whose tires were covered in paint! In 1936 Schawinsky was invited by Joseph Albers (Assistant Director of the Bauhaus) to emigrate to the United States and teach at Black Mountain College, where he taught Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and inspired “The Happening.” Schawinsky later settled in Greenwich Village where when not making art he could be found playing chess in Washington Square Park. Marcel Duchamp was a frequent opponent.

Champions of Modernism III continues its modernist survey from the 1940's thru the 1960’s with artists Seymour Fogel who is considered by many to be America’s greatest muralist, and Irene Rice Pereira, who eclipsed Rebay as the best female Non-objective painter of her generation. Rarely seen representational works by Bauer, Rebay, Pereira and Fogel will also be featured.

The Wendt Gallery survey concludes with a group of contemporary artists who continue to work in a modernist idiom. Gary Stephan who has had a distinguished career experimenting with impossible geometry will exhibit his masterpiece What Objects Dream from the original Champions tour as well as three more recent paintings. Peter Vogel, one of the pioneers of electronic interactive sculpture and a trained physicist, will exhibit two minimal music sculptures - works that reacts to changes in light and shadow, and one light sculpture that reacts to sound. Form follows function in these elegant works where transistors and circuitry float on armatures without the use of circuit boards. Painter Victor Matthews’ work is a blend of influences from graffiti and hip-hop to Brice Marden and Robert Motherwell, while Daniel Villeneuve plays with geometric forms in both two and three-dimensional works. Finally, the abstracted and vibrant multi-media lenticular works of Mary Ann Strandell complete the show with their electric palette, dizzying movement and sensual textures.

Wendt Modern is a fine art gallery whose purpose is to create greater awareness of the importance the arts play in contemporary culture. By showcasing past and present, representational and abstract in Champions of Modernism III, the gallery hopes to bring special focus to the influence that early modern artists have played on the art of today.

Written by Serina Bauer-Manqueros, curator of the Wendt Modern Gallery.

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