ZEE \ Kurt Hentschläger (2011)

Kurt Hentschläger has spent a lifetime creating artworks that push the viewer into a state of sensory overload.

ZEE is no exception. As one visitor put it “It is really hard to say something smart about something so sensual”. Variously described as “insane”, “like entering heaven” and “another planet”, ZEE is an installation of fog, light and sound that transformed Gallery 1 at FACT into an out of body experience.

An installation “like death” that has audiences struggling to believe the evidence of their senses, this manifestation of Hentschläger’s distinct and mind-altering artwork was a UK first.

“… this is the world as viewed by a dying robot clone from the inside of a Turner landscape painting…” – Claudia Hart

New York based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates immersive, audiovisual installations and performances. Between 1992 and 2003 he worked collaboratively within the artist duo “Granular-Synthesis”. Hentschläger’s works have characteristically been visceral and immersive, as in ZEE and FEED, with extreme perceptual effects, composed from light, sound and fog. These works physiologically affect the viewer’s experience. His CLUSTER series builds on the uncanny, by portraying 3D representations of humanoid creatures that can only exist in dynamic flux, seeming to swirl and flow like the wind, apparently unhinged from the screen that they are projected on. His most recent, emerging body of work including MEASURE and ORT is tracing the concept of nature and appropriation of nature in the 21st century.

Image: Kurt Hentschläger