“The viewer is in the picture. “*
Wolfgang Kemp
The colored perception
Beauty? Art? Form? Color? None of these terms, which we use daily, often casually, and with which we try to describe what we “look at”, can be precisely defined. The scientific disciplines of brain research have long been searching for answers to the questions of our visual perception and the art sciences are concerned with the method of reception aesthetics, which assumes that the meaning of images is only created in the process of perception and in the interaction of the viewer under the influence of his or her evolutionary and cultural influences.
In the current exhibition with the works of Inge Jakobsen and Hirofumi Fujiwara, we are showing two artists who challenge our subjectively colored perception in very different ways.
It is well known that color cannot be perceived without light, but scientists believe that color cannot be seen without form either. “In order to construct color, the brain must compare the incidence of light on different surfaces, “* says Semir Zeki, an important representative of neuroaesthetics, in an interview on the subject of perception.
The artist Inge Jakobsen deals with the phenomenon of the interaction of color and form.
Her art combines opposites such as painterly sensitivity and formal precision in a multifaceted vocabulary of forms. In an interplay between colored surfaces and energetic forms, she creates compositions that give rise to imaginary spaces and vibrating color oscillations.
In her current works, which are made partly of wood and partly of shaped canvas, the theme of the complementarity and duality of form and color, of light and dark and ultimately of all opposites that cannot work without each other is artistically questioned. “I see my pictures and objects as pieces of arithmetic, puzzles or cabals that have to be solved, “* writes the artist. But what puzzles do her color-intensive and at the same time seemingly concrete works pose? What effect do they have on our perception or vice versa?
Hirofumi Fujiwara’s naturalistic, anthropomorphic sculptures in turn evoke the question of how our perception reacts to the form that is most familiar to us, namely the human image.
His sculptures are not depictions of individuals with characteristic features. Ethereal, almost sexless, but haunting in their silent presence, they appeal to aspects of familiarity and strangeness at the same time. The unfathomable nature of the human being, which offers an unlimited number of possible interpretations, is the reason for the artist’s exploration of figurative representation. For this fact leaves the way Hirofumi Fujiwara’s figures are seen entirely in the eye of the beholder. Everyone, depending on their own viewing habits, cultural influences and world views, will believe they recognize their own in this aesthetic example of man.
Tinatin Ghughunishvili-Brück | Art Historian & Curator Munich
*KEMP, WOLFGANG: Der Betrachter ist im Bild, Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, Berlin 1992
*Semir Zeki in an interview with Stefan Klein,
ZEITMAGAZIN NO. 2/20192. JANUARY 2019, 4:49 PM EDITED ON 7 JANUARY 2019, 8:48 PM
*Artist statement, Inge Jakobsen, 2019
