(Image: György Kepes (1906-2001) © Estate of György Kepes)
THEY may look like conventional photographs, but no cameras were used in the making of György Kepes's "photograms". Instead, the artist arranged objects directly on top of light-sensitive paper, then illuminated them. Kepes showed just as much enthusiasm for scientific and mechanical subjects as for natural forms, and this is reflected in the 80 photographs, photomontages and photograms now on display in Liverpool, UK, where leaves, eyes and feathers rub up against cones and prisms.
(Image: György Kepes (1906-2001) © Estate of György Kepes)
Hungarian-born Kepes was a member of Germany's Bauhaus art movement, which between 1919 and 1933 combined craft, technological innovation and fine art in pioneering ways, to international acclaim. The Nazis hated the Bauhaus, and Kepes, like many of his peers, ended up in the US.
Kepes arrived in Chicago in 1937, where he worked for his old friend, the artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, at a new art school dubbed "the New Bauhaus", later the Institute of Design. The images here date from the years Kepes spent as head of the school's hugely influential Color and Light department. His pupils included Saul Bass, who designed posters and title credits for Alfred Hitchcock and many others.
Kepes's work is on show at Tate Liverpool until 31 May. Simon Ings
This article appeared in print under the headline "Silhouettes in reverse"
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