Transpose

The starting point for the practical work was a selection of well-known abstract artworks from the fields of concrete art, colour-field painting and hard-edge painting. The unifying feature of the selected paintings was the more or less articulated geometric painting style – with two-dimensional colour zones delineating one another. The students were asked to examine the structure and impact of individual example paintings, and subsequently to interpret them as three-dimensional bodies. In the first step, the two-dimensional example images were translated into monochrome relief-like visual figures via the application of shading gradients. Next, they were transferred to three-dimensional space by means of model making. Finally, the bodies created in this way were perspectively transposed to a photographic visual context using photography and digital montage. In addition to teaching digital image-processing and montage techniques, the aim was to encourage spatial imagination and to demonstrate the scope for interpretation between two-dimensional and spatial representation.