2023 The Endless Interior
2023
CRITICAL & CURATORIAL PRACTICES
IN DESIGN EXHIBITIONGLEN EIRA GALLERY
6th October – 12th November
Including Works from The Museum of Disappearing Interiors
Part Architecture | Part Archive | Parts Unkown
The Endless Interior borrows from Frederick Kiesler’s idea of Vienna as an ‘endless interior’. The exhibition continues an ongoing survey into the oeuvres of European-trained émigré creatives in Australia and New Zealand in the post-war period. European exiles cast their influence across the entire sphere of Antipodean artistic practice and the fully designed and carefully crafted interior was the nucleus of their contribution to modernist Australia. Significant material culture from this crucible of modernity, including furniture, artworks and archival research material will feature in the exhibition.
The exhibition will be turned into a ‘living exhibition’ through the participation of master’s students from the Melbourne School of Design. The gallery will be transformed into a curatorial laboratory with students exhibiting work from Critical & Curatorial Practices in Design 2023 as a collective show titled, ‘The Museum of Disappearing Interiors’.
Frederick Kiesler worked for a period with Adolf Loos, was an architect, theoretician, theater designer, artist and sculptor. His famous drawing of Vienna’s Karlsplatz in the 1920s, was published in the July 1961 issue of Progressive Architecture – portraying a city of interiors where he suggests that the visible city is but the cover for a single vast interior. He insisted that there were not only “extraordinary individuals, but extraordinary groups and, most significantly, meeting places, private apartments, studios, and above all cafés where people would gather”.
The ‘Endless Interior’ forms part of a collaborative research project led by the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural History (ACAHUCH). The research explores a group of emigres including: Heinrich Kulka who settled in Aukland, Ernst and Anna Plischke who settled in Wellington, familiar names like Ernest Fooks, Karl Hofmann, Gertrude Hofmann ,Frederic Rosenbaum, Henry Manne, Slawa Duldig, Louis Kahan, Andor Meszaros, Ernst Deutsch and kurt Popper who all settled here in Melbourne. Margaret Michaelis, Grete Weissenstein, Paul Kafka, Harry Seidler, Ernst Korner and Hugo Stossel who all settled in Sydney. Robert Sheldon and Fritz Kos who settled in Perth and Karl and Gertrude Langer who settled in Brisbane to name just a few. The exhibition, ‘The Endless Interior’ at Glen Eira gallery from Oct-Nov 2023 is a prelude to a larger exhibition and research project that will hopefully travel to Vienna in the coming years.
Amongst this diaspora were artists, designers, dancers, furniture makers, photographers, architects and landscape architects. Significant material culture from this crucible of modernity, including artworks and furniture, also migrated around the world including to Australia and New Zealand. Over eighty years on, Austria to the Antipodes proposes to be the first major exhibition to explore this Viennese-Antipodean legacy by returning this material culture and the émigrés’ Antipodean work in exile back to Vienna.
MAIN IMAGE:
Frederick Kiesler: The Endless House 1959.
