Materials Lab Workshop: The Matière — Material Experiments from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College [AT CAPACITY]

This event is at capacity.

Anni and Josef Albers, who began their artistic careers at the Bauhaus in Germany, encouraged their students at the school to test the mutability of materials through their juxtaposition, in an exercise called the matière — French for material. Fundamentally, the matière is concerned with combining textures or “surface appearances” of stuff. Can you make a hard material look soft? Can you make two disparate materials look the same? After a brief presentation and discussion to situate the topic historically, participants will be led by Albers Foundation educator Fritz Horstman through several matière exercises.

Fritz Horstman is artist residency and education coordinator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where he has worked since 2004. He has lectured and given workshops at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Bauhaus Dessau, the Royal College of Art in London, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and many other institutions. He is also an artist who has shown his photographs, sculptures, drawings, and videos in recent exhibitions in Norway, France, Russia, Japan, and the United States.

This program is offered in conjunction with the special exhibition The Bauhaus and Harvard, on view at the Harvard Art Museums from February 8 through July 28, 2019.

The workshop will take place in the Materials Lab, Lower Level.

$15 materials fee. Registration is required and space is limited. Materials fee must be paid to confirm registration. Please email am_register@harvard.edu, stop by the museums’ admissions desk, or call 617-495-1440 to register. Minimum age of 14; no previous experience is required.

Support for the Bauhaus exhibition is provided by endowed funds, including the Daimler Curatorship of the Busch-Reisinger Museum Fund, the Charles L. Kuhn Endowment Fund, and the Care of the Busch-Reisinger Museum Collection Fund. In addition, modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.

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