Dr. julius | ap closes out 2017 with Ultraviolett. The exhibition features works by Jeongmoon Choi and Regine Schumann that enable the viewer to perceive interactions between space, object, and color in unfamiliar ways. Hitparade, an interactive installation by Gilbert Hsiao, expands the experience with the elements of movement and sound. The use of so-called “black light,” whose special qualities are integral to all three artists’ practices, gives rise to an extraordinary, and comprehensively different experience of art.
The gallery’s main rooms are transformed by the interactions between Korean artist Jeongmoon Choi’s constructive sculptural installation and Cologne-based Regine Schumann’s fluorescent acrylic glass objects. While Choi creates a traversable sculpture from optically dense luminous white surfaces of thread, stretched artistically across the space, Schumann’s radiant wall sculptures mix light to create fields of color that stand in precise relation to Choi’s piece. With the addition of ultraviolet light, the artistic space thus created holds a distinctive magic that is both jarring and fascinating.
In the “Kabinett,” the gallery’s smaller space, viewers can also experiment for themselves with optical effects under a black light by choosing arrangements of spinning discs—vinyl records in standard sizes that Brooklyn-based artist Gilbert Hsiao has painted with geometrical shapes. The visual experience is also influenced by the addition of music: in the background, a symphony plays—but stretched to a length of 24 hours, its extreme slow speed turning it strange and alienating.
Together, the situation of heightened perception offered by these works intentionally explodes the traditional boundaries of a gallery exhibition, presenting an attractive contribution to the field of light-based art, and demonstrating its possibilities as an artistic concept.