Currently on display at the Saarland Museum in Saabrucken: The exhibition “Sunset Guest House” by Daniel Hausig features new works by the artist, who has been exploring the boundaries between painting, photography, light, and light-based media for decades.
Daniel Hausig’s installations and interventions are created along the cross joints between pigment-based painting, the light-drawing possibilities of photography, and light-based media. In “Sunset View,” the focal work in the current exhibition, Daniel Hausig succeeds in weaving countless visual impressions of sunsets into dynamic color formations that capture the vivacious momentum associated with the coming and going of light even more than the image itself.
Daniel Hausig lives in Hamburg, where he completed his art studies at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg in 1996. Since 1999, he has been a Professor of Light and Intermedia at the University of Fine Arts in Saarbrucken. In the context of the HBKsaar, he develops transmedia projects dedicated to the continuation of painting with contemporary media. His projects range from video mapping projects in public spaces in Saarbrucken to museum projects, such as developing alternative programs for the media façade of the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Muenster designed by Otto Piene.
He began experimenting with electroluminescent screen prints as early as the 1990s. One of his first large-format works was “Indirect Light Recycling” (1994/1995), in which Hausig visualized the relationship between energy, light, and space. Over the years, he experimented with luminous materials, light-based imaging processes, and new media.
In 2000, he was one of the artists at the first LICHTPARCOURS in Braunschweig with the installation “Boxenstop”. In 2002, he was part of the first edition of the light art festival LICHTROUTEN in Luedenscheid with an installation titled “Prototype for Theft of Electricity”. In 2005, he was represented in the comprehensive exhibition at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe titled “Light Art from Artificial Light ” (2005-2006). He participated in exhibition projects at the Art Museum in Celle, the Center for International Light Art in Unna and the Kunsthalle Bremen. In Daniel Hausig’s exhibition history his persistent enthusiasm for artistic research interweaves with the growing acceptance of light and light-based media in art institutions.
The installation “Sunset View” impresses with its 17-meter length and 5-meter height. It dominates the space and creates an immersive experience for the viewer. The artist visualizes not only a pictorial impression but also the associated energy. Daniel Hausig shows color from the perspective of light as a fleeting phenomenon, conditioned by the light situation. Just as the Impressionists of the 19th century attempted to capture the transient effects of natural light on canvas, Hausig thematizes the temporality and variability of light in evolving chromatic fields.
He uses the serial arrangement of luminous lines as a canvas for the play of light. The LED-based matrix is controlled digitally and played with video sequences. This technical configuration enables precise control over color gradients and light intensities. His technical approach can also be understood as a contemporary furthering of the serial art of the 1960s, as characterized by Dan Flavin or Robert Irwin. However, Hausig transforms this minimalist approach applying 21st-century digital media.
His canvas is a double-sided structure that creates two distinct but interconnected pictorial planes. It consists of two vertical rows of luminous lines arranged back-to-back. The interplay of the two pictorial planes creates complex, three-dimensional textures. The animated color fields are based on the color behavior of sunsets, and the flowing color transitions are reminiscent of lava flows or solar winds. “Sunset View” represents an extraordinary synthesis between technology, media representation, and an ever fascinating natural phenomenon. It is on display at the Saarland Museum in Saarbrucken until October 13.
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