Manfred Mohr: Half Planes
Artist(s):
Title:
- Half Planes
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 1996
Medium:
- Construction
Size:
- 60.5" x 40"
Category:
Keywords:
Artist Statement:
In my artistic development, I did not have the typical constructivist background. I was an action painter and jazz musician. Through a development of consciousness, I detached myself from spontaneous expressions and turned in the mid 1960s, to a more systematic and, therefore, geometric expression. It was mainly the writings of the German philosopher Max Bense and the French composer Pierre Barbaud that radically changed my thinking, pointing to a rational construction of art.
Since 1973, I have been concentrating on fracturing the symmetry of a cube (including since 1978, n-dimensional hypercubes), using the structure of the cube as a “system” and “alphabet”. The disturbance or disintegration of symmetry is the basic generator of new constructions and relationships. The computer became a physical and intellectual extension in the process of creating my art. I write computer algorithms: rules that calculate and then generate the work, which could not be realized in any other way. It is not necessarily the system or the logic I want to present in my work, but the visual invention that results from it. My artistic goal is reached when a finished work can visually dissociate itself from its logical content and convincingly stand as an independent abstract entity.
Over the past two decades I have had many solo and group shows in galleries and museums worldwide. In 1994, the first comprehensive monograph on my work was published by Waser-Verlag (ISBN 3-908080-39-8) in Zuumlrich.
