Cospudener & The Bauhaus: Leipzig Residency, Part 5

By  Shangkai (Kevin) Yu (MFA 2014)

It is my feeling that it would be important to make a post that reflects our time here accurately. Beer drinking, sausage eating, lake swimming, grass and beach napping, museum visiting, and painting are our life in Leipzig.

Before going on to the museums and general art talk, here are two pictures that sum up our leisure time:

Tim sleeping on the grass at Cospudener Lake

View of the canal on our bike ride home from the lake.

In the past two weeks, the two most memorable things for me were the visits to Das Bauhaus in Dessau and the Museum der bildenden KünsteLeipzig.

I am going to dispense with the description of the Bauhaus architecture we saw in Dessau, and just have the following three photos sum up our visual experience there. 

The entrance to Bauhaus in Dessau, designed by WalterGropius.

Another view of the Bauhaus building.

One of the Masters’ Houses built for the instructors, which include Walter Gropius, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

The highlight of the day at Bauhaus for me was not really the architecture that seemed all too familiar to us by now, but the original documents of the institution on display in the exhibition space. 

Among them was Walter Gropius’s “Lehrschema, 1922” (instructive schematic):

This is the original German version of the Lehrschema

Here is the English version of the schematic.

Having been to two different towns outside of Leipzig for art sightseeing, Tim and I finally, in the third quarter of our stay here, went to see our local Musem der bildenden Künste Leipzig. 

A sculpture by Neo Rauch in the Musem der bildenden Künste Leipzig.

The gem of the day at the museum for me had to be one of Werner Tübke’s paintings “Chilenisches Requiem.”

“Chilenisches Requiem” by Werner Tübke

The surface of the painting took me by surprise. Tübke chose to describe most things in this painting with the exact same technique. Viewing the painting at an arm’s length, this decision creates a strange effect, where the flesh transitions seamlessly into the garment, the pebbles into flesh, and the mountain range into the tree trunk. Everything in the painting seems be frozen.
 

A detail shot of the painting, taken by Tim Buckley

Both Tim and I had difficulties deciphering the technique Tübke used in this piece. The scintillating texture on the forms seems at once strangely familiar and foreign to me. By chance I spotted the texture of the orange rind in a Dutch still life painting, and found the likely source of this peculiar form description in Tübke’s painting. 

There are only eight days left till our final show here at LIA. We have decided to buckle down in our studios for the time being, and hopefully we would be able to channel some of the inspirations we got from seeing the many incredible paintings in the museums.

On May 31, four Academy students arrived in Leipzig, Germany, to start a two-month residency hosted by the Leipzig International Art Programme. Alicia Brown, Tim Buckley, Krista Smith and Shangkai (Kevin) Yu (all members of the class of 2014) will share their experiences here throughout the summer!