With the solo exhibition Urban Transparency, the Kunstgewerbemuseum presents glass objects and paintings by Berlin artist Julius Weiland for the first time. On view is a group of works consisting of 12 paintings and 12 glass objects in which the artist addresses architectural ornamentation of post-war Modernism in the 1960s to 1980s.

Julius Weiland focuses primarily on architectural visions of Socialist Modernism. He examines these buildings in terms of their aesthetic meaning and formal language. In his paintings, he reduces the architecture’s formal austerity and decorative elements to two-dimensional coloured surfaces that become utopian visions of space. The glass vases incorporate the ornamentation of the structures. Rustica or tile mosaics are abstracted and painted onto the glass objects using glass-painting techniques.

Julius Weiland (b. 1971 in Lübeck) studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg in the class of the renowned glass sculptor Ann Wolff. Weiland has taught at the Institut für Künstlerisches Glas und Keramik in Höhr-Grenzhausen and in the joint course of the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and the Weißensee Kunsthochschule at Berlin Glassworks, among other institutions. He is a member of the artistic advisory board of the Kunststiftung Sachsen-Anhalt. Works by Julius Weiland are represented in numerous museums and public collections worldwide, including the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, the Victoria & Albert Museum London, MusVeree, Sars-Poteries, France and the Notojima Glass Art Museum, Japan. In 2023, Julius Weiland gave the Large Plate, a glass dish also featured in the exhibition, to the Kunstgewerbemuseum.

Curator

Theresia Schmitt, assistant curator at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, has curated the exhibition.

A special exhibition of the Kunstgewerbemuseum – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin