Aurelian Froment: Fröbel Fröbeled

Fröbel Fröbeled is the culmination of French artist Aurélien Froment’s extensive research into German educationalist Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852), founder of the first Kindergarten.

Fröbel developed a series of educational toys (balls of wool, wooden geometric shapes, pattern blocks), which he embedded into an open-ended sequence of objects whereby each shape suggests the next. He called them Spielgaben, literally ‘play gifts’. Though Fröbel’s work was influential and the gifts were widely adopted by educationalists, appreciation of the system’s consistency has been diluted and lost over time.

Froment’s ambitious new body of work is centered around a set of replicas of ten Fröbel gifts. These are shown alongside carefully staged photographs of the toys ‘in action’, as if they were performing some of the instructions provided in the early handbooks in which they were depicted. The exhibition reconsiders the gifts as enigmatic cultural forms, depicting them as products of an idealised world view – that of modernity – but also as objects that suggest freedom and agency.