Bauhaus Architecture Photographies in Tel Aviv

Having as a focus the building fragments build in the 1930s from the 20th century, the pictures show the city adaptation to the Bauhaus influence executed by architects that worked in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. Tel Aviv, from the 1930s and 1940s, was some sort of laboratory where the architects, educated in many European countries, created in the shores of the Mediterranean a "modified modernism". Most structures of International Style in Tel Aviv are modest residential buildings, built to have place to the immigrants that came from Europe those years.
The importance of the many tendencies of the Modern Movement in the city architecture and urbanism was one of the factors considered by UNESCO in the tribute of World Humanity Heritage to Tel Aviv - a White City - in 2003.
The clear perspectives and dynamic compositions that are inherent to this job, echo in their own way, the avant garde picture of the 30s. The use of the colour, marked by the local light, shows the attributes of the modernist architecture and the city that it formed.
The exhibition is a partnership between Casa da Arquitectura, the Israel Embassy in Portugal and the EDP Foundation by occasion of the Bauhaus 100 years.
The 30 pictures, that belong to the book "Fragments of a Style" from Yigal Gawze, are present in the exhibition space with 4 videos about the life in the city of Tel Aviv and Bauhaus. Many documents (audio-visual and printed) invite the visitor to explore the 14 years of the Bauhaus School, founded in 1919, as well as its legacy all over the world.

THE LIGHT AND THE WHITE CITY

The photograph project
When I lived in Paris in the 1990s, I used to visit Tel Aviv and it was back then that I rediscovered its cultural inheritance of the 1930s. The white facades of the "Bauhaus" buildings that had been recently restaured, have called my atention.
Being "a turist in my own city" has its advantages, my eyes became more sensitive to the urban lanscape of Tel Aviv. I took my camera and began a long investigation, with the mission of capturing beauty, that was hidden for a long time.
While I looked up and saw the white façades with the profound winter blue sky as an ideal background, I was attracted to dynamic compositions that I could recreate. The marked angles, that just for themselves, are a tribute to the avant-garde photography of the 1920s, they found the perfect balance as soon as it entered the buildings. Here, my eyes focused on the know-how and in the past and present tributes present in the details of the stairs and windows that, despite the ink deterioration, they had visible mark of the International Style.
The light passage to a more diffuse light is similar to the passage of a public space movement to a semi private. This rhythm was composed by inspiration moments, where the right light was projected over a surface or filled the space. It was some sort of privilege situation, planned sometimes, other times by chance, where things fitted and merge themselves.
Since the beginning, I chose to focus on fragments. I felt that I could capture the International Style by centring myself in an essential part of the structure that loads the genetic code. It was also an attempt to pass the utopia of the years that saw the construction of the "White City". Only in the last part of the work, I stepped behind to relate myself with the building in its all and its relation with the street and the city around it.
Work with natural light has always been my passion. In this project I had the double task of having the domain of the local natural light, known for being hard to work with and, at the same time, give it the character and the atmosphere that it creates.
Therefore, my photographic work is somewhat an echo of the attempt by architects, who worked in Tel Aviv in the 1930s, to create a new architectural language based on their European roots.
The images contribute to create a portrait of a unique place, revealing the poetic essence of its architecture and the role that light plays in shaping it. In addition to the obvious sense of nostalgia, Modernism is here at its peak.

© Yigal Gawze 2019

Yigal Gawze is a photographer, artist and explorer at Bauhaus in Tel Aviv, where he was born.
He studied architecture at the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto, and after practicing for a few 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 this period, he began to explore Tel Aviv's 1930s Modernist architecture - a project that would eventually evolve into the photo essay Fragments of a style that 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 of the urban landscape and the private space, this one being part of his closest environment. In both, the artist focuses on the fragment as a means of revealing the essence of the whole.