Jess and Julian Voss-Andreae

I've been emphasizing artists like Jess who had prior training in math or science. There are two new exhibits in New York that relate. "Jess, Paintings and Paste-Ups" is at the Tibor de Nagy. (In Portland, you can still catch Jess: To and From the Printed Page at Reed College's Cooley Art Gallery.) Also see this listing in the NY Times.

The second exhibit pertaining to my theme on artists with training in math or science, is To Infinity and Beyond: Mathematics in Contemporary Art, at the Heckscher Museum of Art on Long Island. I expected to find a few artists in the show who trained and worked in something related to math. Of the 33 or so artists, as far as I can tell, there is one with some kind of rigorous training — Julian Voss-Andreae. Most if not all of the others are artists with a peripheral interest in math. Voss-Andreae, now of Portland, Oregon, studied physics at the universities of Berlin and Edinburgh. He did graduate research in quantum physics. He then went on to earn a BFA in sculpture from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Unlike most of the other artists in the Heckscher exhibit, his work isn't based on a superficial understanding of math or science. As elegant as many of the other artists works are, they are generally based on trivial or simple math concepts. Voss-Andreae on the other hand has actually developed something new from a scientific source.