Illusionary Nature

Digital Worlds
November 10, 2019 to February 2, 2020

Today’s world cannot be imagined without digital media, which have a formative influence on life’s reality in the 21st century. The technical basis of their development, however, goes far back into the past century: the computer was developed during the 1940s as a machine designed primarily to execute complex calculations, and was originally not meant to be an artistic tool. However, during the course of the 1960s, when the first graphic images were generated by computer, it quickly joined the range of artistic possibilities. The earliest computer-based drawings laid the foundation for a new manner of generating images in the arts, and ever since this new method has profoundly influenced our aesthetic sensibility.
 

Must the spirit ‘of the modern work of art’ be realized by hand or by a machine? For the modern artist of the future, consequence will lead him to the latter, even if one may be inclined to consider this heresy for the time-being.

Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, architect, 1918

In its exhibition “Illusionary Nature. Digital Worlds”, the Museum Sinclair-Haus shows works by contemporary artists who use digital compositions to approach a traditional subject of art – namely nature. The results are virtually composed places of yearning whose idyll, however, is frequently disrupted by the cool hyper-reality of artificial animation. These digital landscapes appear foreign yet familiar at the same time. In their works, the artists explore the borders between reality and image, questioning the human perception of the world. The exhibition features digital works on the subject of “nature” from the 1960s to this day.