Otti Berger: Weaving for Modernist Architecture

Otti Berger (1898–1944) was one of the most important textile designers of the 20th century. A core member of the experimental approach to textiles at the Bauhaus, she was also a female entrepreneur in the frenzied time that was the early 1930s in Berlin, and, ultimately banned from working by Nazi politics, spent two years of professional exile in London. Working closely with architects of the New Objectivity movement such as Lilly Reich, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Hans Scharoun, Berger designed upholstery and wall tapestries, curtains and floor coverings that responded to novel types of use and production methods, and thereby redefined the relationship between aesthetics and function―with fascinating results.

Berlin-based visual artist and author Judith Raum has conducted intensive research in European and North American archives to complete the first comprehensive study of Berger’s scattered estate. On the occasion of the release of Otti Berger: Weaving for Modernist Architecture, published by Hatje Cantz and edited for Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, join Judith Raum  for a visually rich exploration of what textiles could be and do in modernist interior space.