Rainbow Pickets (Grayscale), 2008
Josefine Lyche (1973, NO)
Trained at Oslo National Academy of the Arts
Lives and works in Oslo and Berlin
Colour phenomena, distortions and optical illusions are recurring elements in Josefine Lyche’s art. She works frequently using popular culture as filter, examples being role play in Warhammer 40K, computer games like Counter-Strike or the wallpaper patterns from the horror film “The Shining”.
Josefine Lyche has produced artworks in the form of computer games, but she also works on large-scale murals in which the layers of paint are first applied and then ground and polished with sandpaper. The title of such a work can for instance be
28 timmar, 7 lager färg, slumpmässigt fördelat. Slipat 4 gånger (‘28 hours, 7 layers of filler with pigments randomly distributed. Polished 4 times’). Even in other contexts her titles play an important role, examples being
Jag är inte 100% tillräknelig (‘I’m not 100% reliable) or
Formel för tidsresande (‘Formula for time travel’).
Josefine Lyche deals with vision and visual disorders, and in her work she often creates psychedelic states and random patterns. In the recent work
Rainbow Pickets (Grayscale) exhibited here in the Göteborg Konsthall the viewer confronts a straight sculptural rainbow – a tribute to the artist Judy Chicago’s minimalist work
Rainbow Picket from 1966.
Her work
Dreamachine 2007 is based in turn on an analogous work with the same title dating from the sixties by the artist Brion Gysin and the scientist Ian Sommerville. Digital streams of colour flow randomly across two plasma screens, and the work is to be viewed with the eyes closed so that the pulsating light can stimulate the optic nerve which then affects the brain and creates a visual experience.
Rainbow Pickets (Grayscale), 2008
Localised mural, acrylic and mdf
Dreamachine 2007, 2007
Two plasma screens, computer with program, 21 Hz monochrome flicker