Split infinity
Split / infinity Derek Ogbourne Galerie Brigitte Schenk
Albertusstr.26 Cologne, Germany (July- August 2016
Derek Ogbourne’s outstanding oeuvre encompasses an astonishing range of media – from monumental installations incorporating video, drawing and sculpture, to abstract painting and performance. At times exquisitely and delicately conceived, sublime and transcendent, other times rough or playful, his imaginative distinctive artworks where traditional, high-tech and low-tech media co-exist, give full voice to what it is to be human, on a perceptual, physical, and metaphysical level, immersing the viewer into visual experiences of powerful resonance.
Split Infinity, Ogbourne’s second solo show at Galerie Brigitte Schenk following his Museum of Optography in 2007, is a splicing together of artworks by the artist from the nineties to the present day. The artwork ranges from the extremely ‘up close’ physical videos in the nineties, to poetic, quiet, solitary photographs, to retro artefacts such as a beautifully crafted machine that fuses marquetry and technology and outlandish interactive machines that invite the viewer to optical adventures and paradoxes of perception, to the recently exhibited cool perceptual paintings of 2015. Ogbourne’s work is always more than the sum of its parts. In speaking about the complexity of seeing, while creating an electrifying atmosphere of chaos, calm, beauty and focused moments of rationality that touches all the senses, these pieces disorient and expand our vision, and ultimately add new territory to the realm of the imagination.
In the artist’s words:
Split Infinity is a fractal idea. In my mind, this is the junction between two opposing directions which can be zoomed into, ad infinitum; it’s the symmetrical order of things; the splitting of sound into stereo or binocular vision. It’s the road that disappears on the horizon; the blank gaze into nowhere; the single colour field - all bringing to mind an idea of the infinite. This exhibition presents works from throughout my career, which together refine an ongoing visual problem of two unified contradictions. We see the uneasy union of two very different ideas that share strong similarities; the physical and psychological pairing to form one hybrid entity. The result is sometimes violent and unsettling, other times warm and transcendental, presented as a dichotomy between central and periphery visual fields as a visual assault that reminds us that what we fear maybe is just out of sight.