With her designs

In the exhibition “Beauty of Form”, the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative
Arts) is dedicated to the work of the designer Christa Petroff-Bohne, who is one of the most important German designers* of the 1950s and 1960s. With her designs for industry, she brought contemporary design into every day culture of the newly founded German Democratic Republic (GDR). As a professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee, she was a formative personality and influenced generations of students. Her work is an important testimony to modern design activities in the GDR and is also relevant in international comparison.

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The presentation in the River Palace in Schloss Pillnitz introduces the designer both as an industrial designer and as a teacher, shows her professional network and illustrates the situation of designers in the GDR as a complex network of relationships. In addition to industrial products, Christa Petroff-Böhne’s teaching activities and her mediation of aesthetic principles are illustrated in an unusual range using works by her students from the basic course “Visual-Aesthetic Design”. The show also focuses on the origins and contexts of this specific basic course for industrial design with references to the Bauhaus, the crafts, the „New Seeing“ and the study of nature.

With this show, the museum once again takes up two themes that it feels obliged to address: on the one hand, the topic of GDR design in a broader discourse, and on the other hand, the examination of the work of female designers in the past and present.