El Lissitzky: Jenseits der Abstraktion

El Lissitzky was one of those famous Russian avant-gardists who artistically supported and decisively shaped the October Revolution and the years of awakening to a new, supposedly better world. A multi-talented artist like so many of his contemporaries, Lissitzky was not only the abstract painter and interior designer that art history has long recognized him as. Since his first trips to the West in the early 1920s, he increasingly occupied himself with design projects that fall more into the realm of applied and representational art. Photography occupied a prominent place in this context: From multiple exposures and photomontage to the photogram, Lissitzky experimented with all variations of the medium and developed a complex photographic visual language that combined Constructivist aesthetics with the demands of the modern media and consumer world. His 1924 advertising designs for Pelikan, created using the photogram technique, proved to be as groundbreaking in the field of commercial advertising as his sensational "Photo Friezes" in Cologne (International Press Exhibition, 1928) and Stuttgart (Film and Photo, 1929) were for the future of exhibition design. This one goes beyond the usual abstraction that we see in books about Lissitzky and was published to mark an exhibition of these lesser-known works at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany. From the collection of Inge Druckrey.