All images courtesy the artist
A watercolor portrait of a child riding through the rain jumps out on Instagram in a feed full of selfies and artfully plated dinners. The puddle is constructed by the pages of an open book. Part sculpture, part sketches, Christoph Niemann's illustrations nurture audiences who otherwise might not find themselves immersed in the visual arts.A photo posted by Christoph Niemann (@abstractsunday) on Oct 11, 2015 at 4:47am PDT
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You will see glimpses of that in Niemann's Instagram work, except that the images are often tools that unlock unbridled creativity. He cites artists like Hockney, Trockel, Ofili, and Pettibon as inspiration for his drawings, but says James Turrell offers the "ideal art experience." His photo challenge with Mashable, spurred from the artist's abstract work, showcased the adaptive nature of functional design, taking everyday objects and incorporating them into a new visual perspective.Niemann's art is starting to transition into gallery settings. The artist showed at Backnang's city museum in Germany and then the reputable Galerie Max Hetzler in 2013, which jumpstarted a new trajectory. (Niemann had another show at Hetzler this summer, celebrating his illustrations in a new edition of Erich Kästner's book Es gibt nicht gutes.) He finds the artistic experience, versus the commercial consumption of his art, allows him to maintain autonomy. "What I find very different once the work is on a wall of a museum is how much control I lose. Reading direction, editorial context, size (a magazine or digital device is always at a pretty predictable distance from the viewer). I’m such a control freak that this loss is difficult to deal with," he says.While his experimentations push the boundary of his varied mediums: ink, watercolor, pencil, and paper. Niemann says, "Nothing beats the sexiness of real ink or graphite on real paper."A photo posted by Christoph Niemann (@abstractsunday) on Sep 13, 2015 at 5:47am PDT
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