Interstice Cycles. 2025
A Dance of Absence and Return. The series Interstice Cycles presents surreal visual loops – repeating sequences of movement in which body and space merge into hybrid, avant-garde visual worlds. These are moving, abstract figures – composed of fragments, textures, and forms, freely combined or intricately interwoven – oscillating between abstraction and corporeality, positioned within artificial, futuristically inspired settings.
The figures from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1912) have always held a special fascination for me. Here, the human body is abstracted within the figures and transformed into a new, geometric, almost sculptural visual language. Through the estrangement of the figures – their mask-like faces, the absence of individual traits, and their unusual proportions – a mysterious, dreamlike effect emerges, resisting any fixed temporal placement. The stage spaces of the Triadic Ballet are likewise deliberately abstract and geometric. The figures are not embedded in naturalistic environments but placed within constructed, artificial scenographies. Through geometric abstraction, reduced color palettes, and theatrical artifice, a transcendent, timeless cosmos arises, in which the figures merge with their surroundings into a Gesamtkunstwerk-like ensemble.
The design elements of the Triadic Ballet form the conceptual foundation of this work and are reinterpreted in a new series of images through computer-based image techniques. Through digital image processing, 3D modeling, and algorithmic design methods, a visual world is created in which body and space coalesce into a hybrid, avant-garde aesthetic. The series explores the boundaries between human form, costume, sculpture, and digitally constructed aesthetics – images oscillating between abstraction and figuration, past and future, materiality and virtuality. The work seeks to capture the fleeting interstices of movement, time, and space in hypnotic loops. In endless cycles, the visible dances with the invisible; moments recur – each loop a breath, each instant a dance of transitions. It is a journey through the flow of object and space, opening, closing, and beginning anew, always in playful dialogue with time.
The digital compositions build upon earlier series – such as Offshoots (2017) or Crossbreeds – Imaginary Still Lifes (2024) – in which the first pictorial approaches are already visible. Through animation, the surreal figures and their stage-like settings are transported into a new dimension, where reality and imagination, body and space, merge in fluid, dreamlike transitions. The work Interstice Cycles was presented to a wide audience in June 2025 as part of the Zurich Art Weekend, in the exhibition Spirit Music curated by Damian Christinger.