Christoph Dahlhausen
Christoph Dahlhausen born in 1960, has been an assistant professor at the School of Art in RMIT University Melbourne/AUS since 2013. His works follow light in abstraction.
Dahlhausen began as a painter but, from the start, was oriented toward the radical elementarization of the painting process. When he then discovered that the stretcher frame’s lower edge that radiated color light fascinated him more than the painting on the canvas itself, the path was open for his specific paintless exploration of painting’s fundamental tenets of color and light and their interaction with the surrounding space. Since then, Dahlhausen has exclusively used elements from the cool world of industrial-made, functionally connotated objects, widely deploying them as ready-mades so as to manifest his “unscientific evidence of light”, as he called a work group from 1996.
The fascination of this “less is more” strategy, purged of all artistic tall-tales and geniusmystification, consists in the fact that the objects, reduced to pure appearance, look completely transformed. The different-sized camera filters, in a loose, rhythmically and musically subdivided order, are arranged on a polished high-grade steel plate and hung horizontally on a wall (Filtered Light). Between their own coloring and that reflected on the wall, they evolve a highly complex interplay that links spatial materialization with ephemeral manifestation. And the white flashes from inside the car-paint-coated aluminum Bodies take their physicality a bit away in favor of a mottled immateriality that bathes the object. If you will: The birth of poetry from the spirit of Concrete and Constructivist Art. Whereby, in all his works, the artist does not operate as a demiurge, but as an arranger, a director, who alone by means of the situations and constellations that he fabricates, makes the unseen visible in the seen, and thus allows perception itself to repeatedly bring on new adventures.
Stephan Berg, Director Kunstmuseum Bonn (GER), January 2017 Into English by Jeanne Haunschild
Prizes
- 1995 | 2. Rhineland-Palatine Photo Award
- 1997 | Hafermagazin Grant, Landau
- 1998 | Ascoli -Piceno travel grant (IT) Ramboux and Award of the city of Trier
- 1999 | Budapest-Grant of the city of Bonn
- 2001 | 1. prize, art in architecture competition for complete design of the police headquarter Trier
- 2003 | Art Award of the city of Bonn.
- 2005/10 | Guest lecturer at RMIT University of Melbourne, Australia.
- 2012 | 1. Prize, art in architecture competition for the large sculpture at brandtelf,Bonn (museum mile)
- 2014 | 1. Prize, art in architecture competition at. Schlüter-Systems, Iserlohn (land and sculpture trapezium 1884)
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