Carsten Nicolai Challenges Sensory Perception with Disorienting Work at Brewer Street Car Park

Carsten Nicolai UniclorPhoto via: Fact Mag

Carsten Nicolai will premier an immersive work, Unicolor, at Brewer Street Car Park in the heart of London’s West End.

Unicolor, produced in conjunction with Vinyl Factory is the latest in a year’s worth of site specific projects installed at the car park-cum-gallery in Soho. These have included Trevor Jackson’s “F O R M A T”, Quentin Jones’s “Fractured and the Feline” and photographer Richard Mosse’s “The Enclave.” This show follows in the footsteps of Nicolai’s previous projects univrs/uniscope version (2010) and unidisplay (2012).

Nicolai’s work is concerned with the relationship between audio and visual art forms. In this new work he has created panoramic expanses of color, designed to almost overwhelm the viewer.

Using light and mirrors Nicolai seeks to create the illusion of infinity citing his inspirations as Josef Albers, Johannes Itten and Goethe’s Theory of Colors. Goethe’s book was a catalog of how color can be perceived in different circumstances, and in turn, the exhibition deals with our perceptions of color using film and sound installation.

The preceding show at Brewer Street was Ryoji Ikeda’s “Supersymmetry” which attracted 14,000 visitors. Ikeda is a long-time collaborator of Nicolai’s as both are concerned with “Mathematic codes, data and random or self-organizing structures,” according to the Vinyl Factory website.

Nicolai and Ikeda are also linked through electronic music and frequently perform together, with Nicolai using the moniker “Alva Noto.” Ikeda is in fact signed to Nicolai’s Raster-Noton record label.

Carsten Nicolai<br> Photo: electronicbeats.com

Carsten Nicolai
Photo: electronicbeats.com

Unicolor is on view at Brewer Street Car Park, Brewer Street, W1F 0LA, from June 24 to August 2.


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