Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch

Paul Goesch (1885–1940) produced one of the most inventive, peculiar, and poignant bodies of work to emerge from Weimar Germany. An artist and architect, he made both fanciful figurative drawings and visionary architectural designs. The latter, in a riot of colors, drip with invented ornament and resemble little made then or since. 

This exhibition highlights the decorative portals and archways that predominate in Goesch’s work. The portal here represents the artist’s metaphysical passages, as a spiritualist steeped in diverse religious and esoteric belief systems, as well as his altered psychological states: Goesch long struggled with schizophrenia, a condition for which he was institutionalized, and ultimately murdered by the Nazis. The portal also suggests Goesch’s liminal status between art and architecture, “sanity” and “madness,” the architecturally trained insider and the institutionalized “outsider.” 

A valued member of Expressionist circles in his time and subsequently forgotten, Goesch is presented here alongside the work of his avant-garde peers. This exhibition, drawn from the collections of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, is the first solo presentation of Goesch’s work in North America and is accompanied by the first monographic publication in English.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website