until Sunday June 02 2013
Mart Rovereto
T : +39 80 03 97 760
Corso Bettini, 43
38068 Rovereto
Italy
"ALCHEMY OF THE EVERYDAY" The Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto presents the first major retrospective on Rudolf Steiner, a universal thinker and artist.
Rudolf Steiner founded the anthroposophical movement, developed the educational concept of Waldorf schools and advocated a holistic view of humanity which shows its influence in many areas of our lives today – including a heightened environmental consciousness, bio-cosmetics and biodynamic agricultural products.
Steiner inspired artists such as Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Joseph Beuysø. He was one of the founders of “organic architecture” and also developed a unique stylistic idiom in the area of furniture design. Several hundred Waldorf schools, numerous anthroposophical clinics and therapeutic facilities, as well as banking institutions and hundreds of farms in many parts of the world bear witness to the wide dissemination and establishment of Steiner’s ideas.
-The first section of the exhibition, entitled Context, provides an introduction to Steiner’s world view and demonstrates the influence of early 20th-century social and artistic movements on his work.
-The second group, Metamorphoses, explores the ways in which Steiner distilled a completely new everyday aesthetic from this social context, applying it to architecture, design, stage performance and many other areas.
-The third section, under the heading Practice, illustrates how Steiner implemented his thoughts on reform in concrete aspects of daily life, and how this continues to impact modern society.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition traces the image of a person whose
opinions and aesthetic positions have, in individual cases, a polarising effect, yet whose holistic view of the world – particularly in the current time of heated debate on topics such
as ecological responsibility, the search for spiritual meaning and an economic system that has gone awry – is gaining renewed attention.
