Otti Berger weaving for modernist
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Textiles for modern spaces
In Berlin in the early 1930s, Otti Berger, a female sole proprietor, created fabrics that fundamentally changed the understanding of what textiles are and what they can achieve. For her upholstery fabric designs, curtains, wall coverings, and floor coverings, she worked closely with New Building architects such as Lilly Reich, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Hans Scharoun. She designed for new uses, thereby re-defining the interplay of aesthetics and function—with fascinating results that remain aesthetically and functionally compelling to this day. Berger's textile oeuvre has been little researched to date; here, the artist Judith Raum succeeds for the first time in comprehensively depicting the complexity and beauty of her fabrics and bringing them to life.
OTTI BERGER (1898–1944) was one of the most important textile designers of the 20th century. Born in Zmajevac, in the former Hungarian Kingdom of Croatia, she studied in Zagreb from 1921 to 1926, and from 1927 at the Bauhaus in Dessau. After teaching at the Bauhaus, she set up her own practice in Berlin in 1932 and designed fabric collections for modern interiors throughout Europe. In 1936, she was banned from practicing her profession because she was Jewish, and attempts to escape to England and the USA failed. She was deported from Croatia to Auschwitz in 1944, where she was murdered.
The visual artist and art historian JUDITH RAUM (*1977) has become a specialist in Otti Berger's work as a result of several research projects on the textile workshop at the Bauhaus. This book concludes her multi-year collaborative project with the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, for which she has comprehensively researched Berger's estate, which is scattered across archives worldwide.
