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Click for more images Nicole Nickel studied painting under Friedemann Hahn at the Academy of Fine Arts, Mainz. At the beginning of the 90's she started to examine two main themes: architecture and the planar surface. While others speckled oil paint onto canvas or worked through their childhood dreams, she placed little geometrical houses onto light blue backgrounds. In her early work, objects without light and shadow float through an idealised sky. Sometimes there's a swimming pool next to a house; or at at other times a similarly symbolic house is placed nearby. However, rather than architecture, geometrical abstraction is the focus of Nickel's work. Instead of reducing her works to perspective illustration, Nicole Nickel uses techniques based around axonometry (where height, width and length are represented in equal measures and shifted onto three axes). Unlike perspective which indicates a sense of depth and sets the viewer in relation to the image, Nickel's use of axonometry suggests detachment from reality. Axonometry is used to guide the viewer out of space, suggesting the distanced accuracy of a technical sketch, blueprint or facade). House, bridge, barrier, chip shop or settlement become abstract forms – while at the same time keeping their geometrical simplicity. Around 1997 Nicole Nickel turned away from the rectangular form of the frame. No longer restrained by their background, cut-out forms become independent of their carriers. >Gebäude< (1997) for instance only consists of an MDF-board containing intensely coloured forms. As a consequence, some years later she made the next step of breaking with the quadrilateral nature of the frame and began to explore the possibilities offered by informatics. Through the computer's ability to change, cancel and reiterate, geometrical forms of unexpected complexity can be designed. Nicole Nickel's most recent works range from architectural realism to extreme abstraction, which through their easily understood themes, nonetheless still maintain a certain degree of reality. Cut-out digital photo-prints installed on PVC become quasi-sculptures, which only lack mass. And although one automatically searches for landscapes or possible architectural forms, Nicole Nickel transgresses the borders of the medium (painting) without paying homage to the tool (informatics) for one moment. Her objects are painted by hand and identify themselves as originals. Their forms: constructed landscapes, pop and impossible. [Thibaut de Ruyter] |
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