Here Come the New Ones! Female Avant-gardists in 1920’s Architecture

Today, Wednesday, February 2, the special exhibition “Die Neuen Kommen!” (Here Come the New Ones!) Female Avant-gardists in 1920s’ Architecture opens in the Kestner-Museum in Hanover. Truly special because the exhibition is a cooperation between the Niedersachsen Architectural Association and the Kestner-Museum, and is presented in both houses simultaneously.

The exhibition will run from February 2 to April 10, 2005 and documents the wide-ranging influence of women architects, artists, designers, filmmakers and architectural theoreticians on avant-garde architecture in the 1920s. Planning, building, designing and furnishing along with writing and theorising on architecture and photographing and filming buildings from the Weimar period became both a profession and an artistic challenge for a new generation of women.

The exhibition offers a wide spectrum: architectural photographs, drawings and documents from well-known collections and private estates as well as models, sculptures, paintings and plans, many of which have never before been seen in public.

Also on display are items from the holdings of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Bauhaus Archive, Museum of Design, Berlin, as well as films from the 1920s. In addition to designs and objects by the Bauhaus architects Wera Meyer-Waldeck, Friedl Dicker and Kath Both, there are works on show by Lilly Reich, for example. The fully accessible Frankfurter Küche (Frankfurt Kitchen) by the internationally renowned architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky is also on display. Alongside drafts and sketches by architect Lucy Hillebrand, Marlene Moeschke-Poelzig and Gretel Norkauer, are photographs taken by the Dessau architect Edith Dinkelmann, who was involved with many modern residential buildings in Saxony-Anhalt in the 1920s.

The photographs, sketches and drawings by the Munich architect Hanna Loev show that an alternative form of Modernism existed alongside the New Building movement among the avant-garde in the 1920s.

Works by women of Jewish origin that disappeared after the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the turmoil of the Second World War will also be shown in the special exhibition.

The exhibition opens on February 2, 2005 at 18.30 hrs in the Kestner-Museum.

For further information please visit: www.Kestner-Museum.de or www.aknds.de