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Hans-Jörg Glattfelder:
"Can something be simultaneously bent and crooked?" |
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| After exploring the work of the members of the MAC (movimento arte concreta), in 1970 Hans-Jörg Glattfelder began to turn his mind to the realm of scientific ideas, and in particular to mathematical theories relating to such geometrical concepts as non-Euclidean geometry, which departs in many major respects from the axioms of the customary form of geometry as laid down by Euclid. |
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The result of his inquiries was a series of two-dimensional works that evoke complex notions of space, such that the traditional rectangular boundary to an image is revoked. Glattfelder investigated for instance the effect of bundles of lines on surfaces of different shapes and showed pale lines on dark backgrounds and vice versa - all the time paying particular interest to the spatial effect created by colours. The way the viewer beholds these works will always be ambivalent: the network of lines suggests a curved surface, from which certain fields of colour appear to emerge, while others appear to recede into the background. But at the same time the two-dimensional physicality of the picture surface remains quite evident. The points of intersection in the networks of lines were later to become the subject of further works because, as Glattfelder noted, they tend to "assume a life of their own in space”. Interestingly the artist already managed to involve the viewer in his visual worlds in the 1960s, just as this was being made a general demand for art. Thus he produced for instance geometrical reliefs – still in a Euclidian space – which thanks to variable perspectives could be perceived in different ways by the viewer. Despite the artist’s scientific approach to art, his works are anything but mathematical display models, but rather visual renderings of unknown spaces.
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Biography
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1939
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born in Zürich, lives and works since 1998 in Paris
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ab 1958
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Studied at the University of Zürich (law, art history, archaeology)
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1963
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Moved to Florence
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1977
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Commenced his series "Nichteuklidische Metaphern" [Non-Euclidian Metaphors]
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1987
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Camille Graeser Prize, Zürich
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1990
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Stay in New York on a fellowship from the City of Zürich Theoretical reflections on
"Meta-Rationalism"
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