Even though Torben Giehler’s paintings look ‘artificial’, the process of image-creation does not take place at the computer, but always directly on the canvas, and by hand.
With their strong, bright colours and grid-like pictorial structure, Torben Giehler’s paintings and drawings automatically remind the viewer of digitally created realms like those familiar to him from computer games, flight simulators or CAD animations. In more recent works, Giehler has rejected his earlier motifs’ orientation on digitally generated models of urban landscapes and turned increasingly to abstraction, experimenting with apparently three-dimensional forms and areas of contrasting colour so that the images tend more and more towards the non-representational. Finally, in his latest works, it is no longer possible to find any association at all with virtual landscapes or urban environments; the pictorial structure appears as a bold interlocking of cubic elements into abstract, usually large-format painting which creates explicit references to prominent representatives of abstraction – mainly to Piet Mondrian, and Blinky Palermo.
Even though Torben Giehler’s paintings look ‘artificial’, the process of image-creation does not take place at the computer, but always directly on the canvas, and by hand. The artist has also developed a special mixing technique for paint and gel, which makes the colours extremely transparent. The use of fluorescing paints in bright colours still intensifies the aesthetic pull that these audaciously balanced compositions of lines, areas and colours exert on the viewer.
To acknowledge the award of the Falkenrot-Prize 2008 to Torben Giehler, Künstlerhaus Bethanien is showing a representative insight into Giehler’s creative work to date (Catalogue available).