EL LISSITZKY. The Experience of Totality

The exhibition El Lissitzky. The Experience of Totality features an outstanding selection of more than a hundred works in a number of disciplines—including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and graphic and typographic design, as well as architecture and exhibition design—that provide an extensive overview of all this artist’s creative facets, from his early illustrations for children’s books in Yiddish to his works for the propaganda magazine USSR in Construction and including his abstract pieces that straddle Suprematism and Constructivism, his Prouns and his research in the fields of exhibition design and publishing and typographic design, which set the standard for contemporary creation.

“The artist is no longer a reproducer but has become the constructor of a new universe of objects.”

El Lissitzky

The Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera presents the work of El Lissitzky, one of the most influential, innovative and controversial artists of the opening 30 years or so of the 20th century, who worked with the Soviets and the European Avant-garde movements of the 1920s and as a propagandist for the Stalin regime in the 1930s.

A painter, designer, architect and photographer, Eliezer (Lazar) Markovich Lissitzky (born 1890 in Pochinok near Smolensk – died 1941 in Moscow), better known as El Lissitzky, was among the creative figures most committed to the renewal of art for the ‘new man’ who sprang the October Revolution. His entire career was guided by his conviction that the artist could be an agent of social change.

He experienced first hand the social transformations of his time, which he captured in a new universal language intended to serve society. He encapsulated the spirit of modernity and understood that new technical, conceptual and artistic approaches could be tried in every field of art. One of the most important characteristics of his work (and his life) was his ability to connect and act as a catalyst for the innovative ideas that emerged in the Soviet Union and Western Europe, and to push at and go beyond existing boundaries. He experimented with numerous artistic media and stylistic devices that would later come to dominate in 20th-century graphic design, exhibition design and photomontage.

When.- From 21 October 2014 to 18 January 2015
Where.- Exhibition Hall at La Pedrera. Passeig de Gràcia, 92. Barcelona.

"Proun"

In his Proun works, Lissitzky succeeded better than any other artist in harmoniously combining the flat Suprematist surface with the laws of Constructivist architecture. Prouns (“projects for the affirmation of the new”), which Lissitzky created and developed between 1919 in Vitebsk and 1923 in Berlin, are dynamic compositions of abstract geometrical shapes—blending painting, design and architecture—with which the artist reflected on the formal properties of transparency, opaqueness, colour, form and line. The use of these compositions in the social space, the outcome of his constant bid to fuse art and life, is also to be seen in Lissitzky’s subsequent employment of this new system in his architectural projects and in his book design and set machinery, as well as in other initiatives. Lissitzky’s Prouns are among his most important contributions to the world of art and the principles behind them had a considerable influence on the members of the Dutch De Stijl group and on the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany.

Regarded as the founder of contemporary typography, Lissitzky worked on book and magazine conception throughout his professional career and in 1919 became one of the pioneers of modern book design. Lissitzky incorporated into his designs many of the visual parameters he employed in his Prouns and manipulated the types and characters as he saw fit depending on the content of the book concerned, as he believed in the expressive potential of the printed word from the visual point of view.

Photography

Lissitzky became interested in photography in the early 1920s, when he moved to Germany as a young man and met a diverse range of European Avant-garde artists, in particular the Dadaists Kurt Schwitters and Hans Arp. His experiments, initially with photograms and later with multiple exposures, produced at the time he took the image and during the printing process, marked a change in his career, as he abandoned painting and began to concentrate on projects in exhibition design and, towards the end of his career, on publication and magazine design that combined photographic and architectural elements. 

USSR in Construction magazine

In the late 1920s, Lissitzky became the leading designer of pavilions for trade fairs and industrial exhibitions in the Soviet Union. International exhibition design encompassed Lissitzky’s various interests, such as architecture, typographic composition, narrative and movement. Later, in the 1930s and until his death in 1941, Lissitzky concentrated on producing propaganda for the Soviet state, in particular through the USSR in Construction magazine, founded on the initiative of the writer Maxim Gorky and intended to promote a positive image of the Soviet Union abroad.