Form and Light is a photography exhibition by Yigal Gawze, who documents the impact of Bauhaus architecture in Tel Aviv, Israel, a city which boasts one of the largest collections of Bauhaus architecture in the world, with 4000 buildings.
Focusing particularly on fragments of the buildings constructed in the 1930s, the photographs examine how the city adapted to the Bauhaus influence brought by architects working in Tel Aviv at the time. 1930s and 1940s Tel Aviv was a sort of lab where architects who studied in several European countries created a “modified modernism” along the Mediterranean shores. Most structures built in Tel Aviv in the International Style are modest residential buildings, erected to house the waves of immigrants arriving from Europe during those years.
The bearing of the various trends of the Modernist movement on the city’s architecture and urban planning was one of the factors taken into account by UNESCO when it designated Tel Aviv’s White City as a World Heritage Site, in 2003.
The sharp perspectives and dynamic compositions inherent in this work echo, in their own way, the avant-garde photography of the 1930s. The use of colour, accentuated by the local light, emphasises the elements of modernist architecture and of the city it created.
Form and Light will be on at the Tejo Power Station’s Turbine Hall from 12 July to 2 September 2019. This exhibition is a partnership between the Israelian Embassy in Portugal and EDP Foundation, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus school.
The 30 photographs on display, taken from Yigal Gawze’s book Fragments of a Style, share the exhibition space with four videos about life in the city of Tel Aviv and Bauhaus. Several documentary media (both printed and audiovisual) invite the visitor to explore the 14 years in which the Bauhaus school operated, having been founded in 1919, as well as its legacy throughout the world.
Yigal Gawze
Yigal Gawze is a photographer, artist and explorer of the Bauhaus style in Tel Aviv, the city where he was born.
He studied Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, in the University of Toronto. After working as an architect for some years in Israel, he continued his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris.
As a freelance journalist based in Paris during the 1990s, Gawze collaborated with European and Israeli magazines in the areas of design, architecture and lifestyle. During that period, he began exploring Modernist architecture in 1930s’ Tel Aviv – a project which would culminate in the photographic essay Fragments of a Style. It also resulted in an exhibition and the publication of the book Form and light | From Bauhaus to Tel Aviv (Hirmer, 2018).
In his art, Yigal Gawze explores both the public space in urban landscape and the private space, which is part of his closest environment. In both of them, the artist focuses on the fragment as a means to reveal the essence of the whole.
