Bauhaus Staircase

About the Photographer

Gaenssler, Katharina

German, b.1974

In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, commissioned Katharina Gaenssler to produce a mural for the third-floor platform of the museum’s Bauhaus staircase to be included in its Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 exhibition. Gaenssler photographed two paintings in MoMA’s collection titled Bauhaus Stairway: one by Oskar Schlemmer and an interpretation of Schlemmer’s painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Both paintings pay homage to the original staircase and school created by Walter Gropius in Dessau, Germany. Gaenssler, looking at the ways that two artists considered the important movement, adds her own interpretation and homage to the ways that the Bauhaus continue to shape art, architecture, and design. This leporello-style book, which fully displays at over 32 feet, is an assemblage of all the photographs she used for the installation. Gaennsler’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Her works are held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, NY; Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, Germany; Bibliothèque d'Art et d'Archéologie de Genève, Switzerland; and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany; among others.