Katharina Gaenssler Bauhaus Staircase 2015

  • Not on view

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
Pigmented 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
Copyright
© 2021 Katharina Gaenssler
Department
Photography
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