Using hundreds of individual photographs, Katharina Gaenssler created a photo-wallpaper installation at the top of The Museum of Modern Art’s Bauhaus staircase, which was designed and named after a staircase at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. By collaging images of the original staircase, its reconstruction at MoMA, and two paintings in MoMA’s collection that depict the staircase, Gaenssler creates an immersive installation responding to what she calls “the flood of images that surrounds [us].”

For this site-specific installation, Gaenssler mined MoMA’s collection for images of the famous stairway in Dessau and explored the history of the Bauhaus and the Museum’s relationship to it. To the mass of architectural photographs she used to create her wallpaper, she added facsimiles of two paintings depicting the staircase by Oskar Schlemmer (1932) and Roy Lichtenstein (1988).

Additional text from

Seeing Through Photographs online course, Coursera, 2016

Medium Inkjet print (artist book)
Dimensions 19 7/8 × 15 3/16 × 7/8" (50.5 × 38.5 × 2.3 cm)
Credit The Photography Council Fund
Object number 294.2016
Department Photography

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