A German artist is holding a photography exhibition looking at society’s relationship with its integral parts.
Sven Schelwach will show 20 abstract images in “The Parallel Universes” at Gallery Dongne in Seogye-dong, near Seoul Station, from Dec. 3.
Schelwach’s main work is designing furniture and he has exhibited furniture several times. The pictures came out of an attempt to provide accompanying wall hangings.
“Most of my furniture at the time was a mixture of wood and stainless steel, so I tried to bring my digital works also on stainless steel as a coherent media for all my work.”
But he was not happy with the print quality that stainless steel gave. After some experimenting, he found an aluminum base he was happy with.
The images themselves are massively expanded and then distorted into highly colorful, shimmering creations.
“Parallel Universes 019” (Sven Schelwach)
“The concept is to take a fraction of a bigger piece and alter it and change it by colors and blurring effects so that it wouldn’t be easy to see what these parts were for in the bigger picture. So I would take these works as a symbol of how we are all super specialized in something.”
Some of the pictures are less distorted and easier to figure out.
“I also included Korean patterns ― traditional patterns that you find on furniture, on prints anywhere really. I found some of them simple but interesting.”
These images are less altered than the rest. Schelwach finds the way they are instantly recognizable an interesting contrast to the more distorted images. But recognized and understood are not the same things.
“I asked people what they stand for and a lot of people didn’t really know,” he said.
Just over half of the pictures will be on aluminum. The rest will be more conventional prints on paper and canvas. He said this was partly because he wanted to carry over the experience of looking at them while working on them.
“Your eyes try to focus what you see but because the original is blurry it’s not really possible. It’s interesting because the picture seems to move all the time, and I want to see on which media this turns out the best.”
“The Parallel Universes” will run until Christmas Day. For directions, visit http://blog.naver.com/dongnemisul.
By Paul Kerry (paulkerry@heraldm.com)
koreaherald@heraldcorp.com
