A Little Piece of Bauhaus
Toronto Premiere
Presented by the Goethe-Institut Toronto
Mies Windows — Crown Hall, Chicago
by Assaf Evron
It is a simple, spare object: showing a clean, well-lighted place. An aluminum frame cradles two color photographs in the same large format, showing two window panes bookended by their black metal frames. The sash in the center may be the same—if these are panes of the same window. Above both—if they are one window frame—hangs a white plastic blinds cover. The object looks like a puzzle. And a glance at the title reveals that we were right—these are windows—but puzzling ones. For these are windows in the S.R. Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, designed by Mies van der Rohe. Where in that lateral monolith are such intimate windows to be found? The façade has three registers of windows—monumental upper ones, the man-sized middle windows, and the half-sized bottom windows, which are below the raised floor of the main space, basement windows really. Evron captured what looks like a sunset gradient in them: turquois turning by and by to the unlikeliest shade of orange pink. Why don’t trees and buildings and the feet of pedestrians intrude? They are frosted windows, which refract the light. It needn’t be sunset. And so the object remains a puzzle. What I first said of the artwork is what I say it shows. The window is a simple, spare object: the world a clean, well-lighted place.
(Andrei Pop, Professor of Art History and Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago)
Assaf Evron is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) and is completing an Mphil at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. He is the recipient of various awards, including The Gerard Levy Prize for a young photographer awarded by the Israel Museum for Jerusalem (2012), and The Israeli Ministry of Culture and Education Prize for Young Artists (2010). Among his photographic commissioned works are Aircraft Carrier the Israeli Pavilion at the 12th Venice Biennial for Architecture, the renewal of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Architect Dov Karmi Exhibition. In 2019, Evron has a Bauhaus related site-specific show at the Elmhurst Art Museum, his first solo US museum exhibition at MCA, running concurrently with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and he has been announced as an Artadia 2019 Chicago Awards Finalist.
Part of the Goethe-Institut focus on Bauhaus 100.
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