The rise of the small town Zlín in the east of the Czech Republic to the centre of the biggest European shoe manufacturer Bat’a is a unique economic and social, but also an architectural phenomenon. Zlín is a “model town of Modernism“, since many architectural and social ideals that politicians, entrepreneurs and architects propagated as visionary after World War I, had been realized there. Thus the town, that Le Corbusier described as a „shining phenomenon“, became a kind of pilgrimage site for all kinds of proponents of progress in the 1930s. 

At the turn of the century, the small place in which Tomáš Bat’a had founded a shoe factory together with his brother and sister in 1894, had 3,000 inhabitants, steadily developing to 43,000 by 1938. Thrilled by the ideas and production methods of the most successful car manufacturer of the time, Henry Ford, and the founder of the science of management, Frederick W. Taylor, the entrepreneurs Tomáš and Jan Antonin Bat’a had the small place systematically developed into a kind of huge laboratory for communal life and work, establishing a system in which the entire town and all its inhabitants were only serving one single purpose - the increase of shoe production. Not only the division of labour, timekeeping and conveyor belts, but also captive social facilities such as nurseries, schools and a hospital as well as a department store, a sports club and a large cinema, aimed at this target. Architecture should also contribute to forming new and better-working people. 

The town is divided into zones assigned to the areas of working, living, spare time and traffic – a separation of functions corresponding to the key concepts of modern town building that were later propagated in the „Charta of Athens“. Decisively influenced by the architects František L. Gahura and Vladimír Karfík, almost all public buildings were developed on a planning grid of 6.15 by 6.15 meters, a uniform measurement which literally served as a standardization of work and life. Starting out from Zlín, Bat’a had factories and towns erected in other countries and continents as a smaller version of Zlín using modern architecture to convey a company-related identity and modernity. 

The exhibition has adapted parts of the Prague show „The Bat’a Phenomenon“ (National Gallery, spring 2009) but has been restructured for Munich. By means of models, plans, objects, photographs and films the architectural development, the linkage of cultural and social life in Zlín as well as the worldwide circulation of Bat’a’s ideas are presented and critically reflected. A separate area, specifically compiled for the Munich show, will be dealing extensively with Le Corbusier’s planning concepts for Bat’a – which have so far been hardly known, even in expert circles (expansion of Zlín, a standard plan for the French shoe shops, the French satellite town Hellocourt and the Bat’a pavilion for the World Fair in Paris in 1937). Some of the original drawings of the Fondation Le Corbusier will be shown for the first time. A big model of the World Fair pavilion – only known as a plan so far – can be experienced in its spatial form for the first time. 

26 January 2010 - 02 May 2010

The first major exhibition of Viola Frey's work since her death in 2004 will be shown at the Museum of Arts and Design. "Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey" will feature Frey's colossal clay figures, sculptures, ceramic plates as well as a selection of her paintings and works on paper. The exhibition was co-organized by the Gardiner Museum, Toronto and the Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin. 

The installation at MAD is being coordinated by the Museum's curator Lowery Stokes Sims and will include works from the MAD permanent collection and several private collections, as well as two examples of Frey's collaboration with ceramicist Betty Woodman. In addition a selection of popular ceramics from Frey's personal collection which served as an inspiration for her "bricolage" sculptures has been lent by the Artists Legacy Foundation. An installation of works in the collection by California ceramicists, organized by Assistant Curator Elizabeth Edwards Kirrane, will also be on view. 

"A pioneer of California ceramics known for her colossal clay statues, Viola Frey was one of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century," said Holly Hotchner, the Museum's Nanette L. Laitman Director.

"It is gratifying to present this influential artist. The Museum was the first collecting institution focused entirely on studio craft, and has been a leader in the documentation of this aspect of twentieth-century art. Viola Frey's "Group Series: Questioning Woman I" (1988) is in the Museum's collection and on view in the third-floor gallery." 

Frey emerged in the complex and often contradictory art world of the 1950's, where painting, craft (specifically ceramics), and design often merged and diverged in dynamic ways. Coming from abstract expressionist traditions in the 1950s, she became involved in ceramics as her contemporaries Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson were taking this medium to new sculptural and expressive horizons. Frey found her unique style and visual vocabulary in her life-long fascination with mass-produced ceramics figurines which she collected in flea markets combining molded and actual versions of these elements in what are known as her "Bricolage" sculptures. 

Frey recounted her own life, as well as late-twentieth century culture, through her art. She is a forerunner in self-revelation by creating sculptures and vignettes based on her own personal relationships, recollections and the people she knew. "Frey is best known for her brilliantly colored, literally larger-than-life ceramic figures of domineering men and over-wrought women," notes Sims. "Not only does Frey reveal her early involvement in painting in the dynamic color glazes of the surfaces of these ceramic sculptures, but she also proves to be a perceptive observer of gender and power issues as they specifically played out in mid-twentieth century America." 

After studying and working in New Orleans and New York, Frey returned to her native San Francisco in the 1960's to devote herself to ceramics, eventually joining the faculty of the California College of Arts. She remained there on staff until she retired in 1999. Early in her career, Frey received major recognition on the west coast in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries. Following an important solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1984, Frey had almost 50 solo museum and gallery shows across the country, at venues including the Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, California; the Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California; the Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco and the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York. Her work is represented in museum collections throughout the world, including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shiga, Japan.