Harm van den Dorpel – Screens and Skin

Artist talk

Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle

18:00 – 19:00

Artist Harm van den Dorpel will offer special insights into his work in a live conversation at the gallery.
In the context of the joint exhibition “Screens and Skin” with Raphael Weilguni, we show five works from the artist's latest series, “Markov's Dream”. The works refer to an invention by the mathematician Andrey Markov (1856–1922), which contributed greatly to the theory of probability and stochastic analysis. To calculate a prognosis, he focused exclusively on the current situation while ignoring past events. Harm’s generative art is determined by random numbers: The animation’s color scheme and arrangement on screen are never reiterated but always elicit new, unpredictable compositions. The rounded square is a recurrent visual ingredient in the artist’s aesthetic vocabulary. It refers to the specific elements in user interface design, which the viewers encounter in their daily lives. These design features are often used in the optimization-focused discipline of user experience design to give various software a more “human” or organic note. Harm goes even further by letting the rounded square look like a living, breathing cell, thus blurring the line between determined programming and an autonomous, “living” organism. Poetically speaking, the artist invigorates what was once frozen.

Since the number of participants is limited, we kindly ask you to register in advance via e-mail.

Furthermore, we are pleased to announce that Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle now represents Harm van den Dorpel.