Alice Bahra

movement

06/04—29/06/25

 

The solo exhibition by Alice Bahra (born 1945 in Landsberg/Lech, lives and works in Dresden and Potsdam since 1953) focuses on a selection of installations and objects from various creative phases.

 

Alica Bahra’s statement, „Longing keeps me suspended, maintaining balance is my life,“ is like a poetic declaration of principle that aptly describes her artistic stance in a few words. For suspension and balance are states that can only be maintained through constant balancing and permanent movement, however minimal this may be (or must be). And precisely these movements are at the conceptual and formal center of Alice Bahra’s oeuvre.

 

Her preoccupations with movement, space, body, and object can be found in art history in the Bauhaus and in the „New Vision“ conceptions of her work. Kinetic objects/sculptures and photographs by László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy-Nagy, and Marianne Brandt provide a reference space for Alice Bahra’s conceptual thinking and oeuvre. Essential here are not only the unusual perspectives on surfaces, objects, and spaces that create image- or object-constituting elements in her work. It is above all the contrasting play of light and shadow, but also their progressions and changes, that create immaterial constants of moments of movement. This creates visual, but also structurally diverse connections between the real object, its imagination, and its forms of movement.

 

Movement is a fragile process of localization, but also of the constant questioning of those locations and their potential spaces. This is precisely the basis for Alice Bahra’s approach to formal schematizations and abstractions: regardless of their referential and symbolic power, the forms have an autonomous existence, follow their own methodological and aesthetic system, and yet are not completely decoupled from reality or even self-referential.