Farbteiler #465
Erik Swahn’s exuberantly colorful Farbteiler (German for 'color divider') employs theory, art history, and geometry to masterfully create visually stunning, timeless pieces. The Swedish artist’s collection explores color-color interaction and how colors interact with geometric structure, sequence, pattern, and even time and truth. Color theory plays a crucial role in Farbteiler, explaining why the eye is immediately and intuitively attracted to each piece. Based on early 20th c. Bauhaus artist and teacher Johannes Itten’s Farbkreis color wheel, Farbteiler employs a random subset of one to twelve colors to create a delightfully washed palette. Using pointillism and drawing on his experience as an architect, these colored patterns transcend space and time with their mathematical and nearly supernatural understanding of palette. The project also serves as a course in generative art history with it’s minimalist structures harkening back to Sol LeWitt’s simple, geometric techniques, particularly his famous work with cubes exemplified by his Untitled (1968).
Each Farbteiler is a rectilinear, mostly self-avoiding walk, dividing the space of the canvas with dotted grids using colors from Johannes Itten's Farbkreis. Everything is inside and everything is outside.