Magic square 1-9 (beween growth and death), 2008
Magic squares are symbols of happiness. But happiness for all people is something different. Therefore I took again the magic squares to work with and added them with overworked photographs.
This square is in the conflict between nature and technique, between the vital life and death. The number's signs show elements of plants (especially flowers) and the background shows 9 coherent details of a burned locomotive. Not only the nature is beautiful to look at, but also the solving of a metal surface can be very interesting to see. There is a time of highest blossoms in nature and in technique realities - or as we had last year in economy. And there is a time of degree in nature as in economy or in technical products (as it is in science).
Deeper information about my motivation and the technique you can find under "magic squares" 1995-2006).
Numbers from "1" to "32", 2005
The transparent number signs symbolise the path of life, the signs symbolise 32 years in a life. The eleven different text passages show different themes that played a role in the 32 years of the person's life. The colour of the background is in line with the theme treated in the text fragment as Eva Heller wrote: Wie Farben wirken (see literature list) ("as colours influence us").
I used quotations from the following philosophers (German titles):
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Vorlesung über die Ästhetik
- Jürgen Habermas: Nachmetaphysisches Denken
- René Descartes: Meditationes de Prima Philosophia
- Martin Heidegger: Sein und Zeit
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Vom Gesellschaftsvertrag
- Aristoteles: Die Nikomachische Ethik
- Immanuel Kant: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten
- Max Scheler: Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos
- Sigmund Freud : Abriss der Psychoanalyse
- Sören Kierkegaard: Abschliessende Unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift zu den Philosophischen
Brocken
- Jean-Paul Sartre: Der Existenzialismus ist ein Humanismus.
The four different colours of the signs symbolise the organism's renewal. The white lines around the signs reflect the light of the paper. The ragged text that is justified to the middle of the image also repeats the structure of the brick wall on which the prints were first shown and becomes blurred towards the white margins of the paper.
Numbers from "17" to "32"
Since 2006
As I did with the numbers of 1 to 16 (see below) I kept the signs in transparent colours and they are all only partly visible The change of the rhythm is stronger here because the signs are more varied and they are sometimes closer together or in larger distances from one to another.
Number from "1" to "16"
Since 2002
Transparencies allow to see what is behind. Larger contexts can be made visible by using transparencies. These images show a detail out of the universe. Therefore all the number signs are cut. For I can always start and finish with counting things. Different colours stand for different things.
Magic Squares, 1995-2004
Calligraphy, pictures of scriptures and signs along with the formation of numbers (13) have fascinated me for a long time. Umberto Eco's theory of signs (14) and (15) has cast a spell over me.
Our communication, also our world of signs, is founded on conventions. These conventions always are broken, therefore they are changed, are displaced, newly defined. Exactly this break of conventions is interesting to me.
In developing their signs for numbers neighbouring people used completely different or similar sign languages in early times. All over the world people developed different scriptures, but they all are committed a special aesthetic form-language.
In my opinion there is existing an universal form-language of mankind, that moves in this or that direction according to cultural origin. I followed all those thoughts with this project:
I discovered an interesting technique to transform numbers (or text) into new signs.
Developing new signs was a quest and a game at the same time and very thrilling, though often without the slightest success. Magic squares are symbols for happiness and an interesting mathematical game. So soon, I thought of arranging the computer calligraphies created this way so as to form magic squares.
To the clean mathematical process of development of the number-signs belongs a colour-system. So I painted a circle of 60 colours and chose 12 of these colours, all equidistant from each other, which I then combined to create colour variations with 9, 16 and 25 squares. Some of them I realized as serigraphies.
While printing these series I thought that it would also be interesting to superpose several number surfaces. In this way an interesting game of forms and colours gets visible.
The numbers and their meanings
In literature (16) I searched for the significations of the numbers from one to nine and translated these significations into a geometric manipulation of the individual numbers (turning, reflecting, constructing them with geometric forms). So it is a try to translate the significations of the single number to a geometric action on the number's sign:
The signs were constructed by using a compass and a ruler and then painted and touched up with Indian ink and white paint. The nine is the only number I redesigned later on the computer because the old version did not reach the quality of the other images.
Chaos and order, 1991-1994
"What will happen if I compose a drawing by adding rows of black and white lines on a millimetre-paper?" I started with one black and one white square all along the line. On the second line is the rest of the first line and then two white squares follow two black ones and so on. It was the literature to the chaos theory that led me to this idea. The two drawings show two principles: the male (all lines are added in the same direction) and the female one (one line is drown from the left to the right an the other from the right to the left).
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