Lo Brutto Stahl is proud to announce Tarantella, a presentation dedicated to the pioneering American filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute (1906–1983), centered around her iconic 1940 film Tarantella. This five-minute abstract composition, set to a score by Edwin Gerschefski, encapsulates Bute’s innovative approach to cinema, blending color, movement, and rhythm in a unique cinematic form.

Bute, a self-described ‘designer of kinetic abstractions,’ was a trailblazer in experimental cinema. From the 1930s, she sought to liberate painting from the confines of the frame, translating abstraction into time-based media. In Tarantella, her aim was not to illustrate dance but to create an autonomous choreography of abstract forms—geometric and biomorphic—that move in ecstatic synchrony with sound. 

While Bute coined the term ‘expanded cinema,’ her influence has often been overlooked in canonical accounts of avant-garde film. However, her work has seen a recent resurgence, with Tarantella featured in the Centre Pompidou’s Elles font l’abstraction (2021), and Rhythm in Light (1934) included in Peter Weibel’s KINETISMUS: 100 Years of Electricity in Art (Kunsthalle Praha, 2022).

The presentation is accompanied by a newly commissioned text by Guillaume Oranger, providing a critical historical and theoretical recontextualization of Bute’s work within the broader narratives of visual abstraction, media experimentation, and the pioneering contributions of women in cinema.

Mary Ellen Bute’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Tarantella opens on Saturday, April 12 and runs through May 24, 2025, by appointment only, at Lo Brutto Stahl, Basel.