100 Jahre Bauhaus: Roman Clemens aus der Sammlung

About

The versatile work of Roman Clemens includes stage design, architecture, exhibition design and painting. At the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he attends classes taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Oskar Schlemmer, he finds the central theme of his 60-year-old work - stage and space. Already in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Clemens worked on the principles of his later work as a scenographer and painter: his stage space was meant to be a space full of excitement and action, but from the public perspective always possessed the qualities of a well-composed painting. After working as a set designer at the Friedrichs-Theater in Dessau, Roman Clemens transfers his principles to the stage of the Zurich Stadttheater (today's opera house), where he worked from 1932 to 1943 as a stage designer and equipment manager. With the interior design and equipment of the former Studio 4 (today's Filmpodium) Clemens 1948/1949 realized together with the architect Werner Frey his probably most impressive spatial art work: an "optical cabinet" whose design entirely from the medium of film - the contrast between static and dynamics, light and dark, black and white - is determined. Roman Clemens turned to painting full-time for painting in the mid-1950s. The fact that she always has something to do with space for him becomes clear in the exhibition at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv. On display is a selection of paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, in which Clemens developed abstract-geometric pictorial spaces by means of a varied array of surfaces and color organization. The paintings, most of which could be included in the collection of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv through a generous donation from the Lis and Roman Clemens Foundation, are complemented by archive material, which also comes from our partial estate of the artist. It includes stage designs from Clemens' time at the Bauhaus and the Stadttheater, as well as photographs and documents from the context of his work as director and designer of numerous didactic exhibitions.