Protein Sculpture

January 19, 2008 9:01 AM

Julian Voss-Andreae is a German-born sculptor based in Portland, Oregon.

In his youth he painted for a number of years, but then changed course and studied physics at the universities of Berlin and Edinburgh. After his graduate research participating in a seminal quantum physics experiment in Vienna, Voss-Andreae moved to the U.S. in 2000 with his passion for art rekindled. He graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2004 with a BFA in sculpture. While still in Art College, Voss-Andreae developed a novel kind of sculpture based on the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. Voss-Andreae’s work has been commissioned internationally and was published in journals such as Leonardo and Science Magazine, one of the world’s leading science journals.

posted by prostyle (10 comments total)

Hey, thanks for reminding me of this person. One of the quantum men is also at the Maryhill Museum, or was the last time we were out there.
posted by sleepy pete at 12:58 PM on January 19, 2008

OK, so this is a bit off-topic, but at the bottom of one of his photographs, the caption reads:

This piece was inspired by research I participated in as a graduate student demonstrating that single C-60 buckyballs (Buckminsterfullerenes) "go through two openings at once", showing genuine quantum behavior despite their large size.

I'm no physicist, so I had assumed the quantum phenomenon was restricted to particles. Does any one know the largest molecule that has been show to have this behavior?
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:27 PM on January 19, 2008

Nice stuff. I particularly enjoyed "Quantum Man, 2006"

Slight derail:
I'm always amazed that so many talented visual artists have such badly designed web sites. Often their posters and cards showing off their work are equally awful.
I'd have thought visual literacy would translate from fine art to design, but this is apparently not the case.
posted by cccorlew at 1:30 PM on January 19, 2008

cccorlew, when I was trafficking in the fine arts (recovering MFA here) things like good graphic design and typing your art history papers was sort of looked down up. The former was proof that you haven't sold out, and the latter is more 'keeping it real'. Too much "quality" (even in your actual artwork) was to be avoided because "mere technical proficiency" is a tool of the establishment, keeping you down. No seriously. For reals. "mere technical proficiency" was an actual quote from an actual art professor.

While not a fantastic movie, Art School Confidential does a great job of satirizing the world of fine art. It does this by being completely honest and faithful to reality. :-)
posted by device55 at 2:09 PM on January 19, 2008

This is some fantastic art, thanks for posting it.

I always like art that has math or science as its theme. I think for a lot of people, the only complex biological molecular structure they may be familiar with is DNA. It's good to see other exotic molecules referenced.

I have to also marvel at the sheer technical talent displayed in fitting these pieces together. Any little deviation from the exact angle or dimension becomes additive as the piece grows. To fit these pieces together in Cartesian 3-space then weld them together accurately is much harder than it may seem. I'm guessing that the pieces were probably CNC machined, but the fitting, as far as I know, would still be by hand.

Impressive.
posted by Tube at 2:24 PM on January 19, 2008

Neat. Reminds me a bit of Bathsheba Grossman's work.
posted by eclectist at 4:25 PM on January 19, 2008

Exactly the kind of art that sports arenas and corporate parks will snatch up. Excellent career move.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 6:35 PM on January 19, 2008

I think it is great that he is multi-talented in such diverse fields as science and art (two of my favs), and he does seem to be a very good artist, but for the most part I have to agree with Joseph Gurl. Good artist, but relevant 50 years from now, other than having made megabucks from corporations fetishizing the helix structure, I think not. Since I'm also in Portland, I'm sure I'll be able to easily check in every couple years and see if he's changed his course or kept on the corporate art track that he seems to currently be on.
posted by Sir BoBoMonkey Pooflinger Esquire III at 7:25 PM on January 19, 2008

Some of Julian's work will be on display at the non-corporate Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ Feb 17 - 23, 2008 –– email me for details.
posted by armacy at 4:36 PM on January 20, 2008

Where I thought his work was strong was his choice of materials, and there were a couple pieces (like the first Buckyball one in that slideshow) where he interacted well with the surrounding space. But generally, I thought his internal composition was often quite weak (or weakly photographed; it's kinda impossible to tell without walking around the piece), and he wildly overstated the importance of his work's relation to science that he found interesting (or interesting science he was involved with). It took me a bit to get that his recurrent "pass in two places" bit was referring to a double-slit type experiment, and even then that didn't seem to prompt any interesting conclusions. His use of quantum phenomenon as a metaphor seemed predicated on simply having this buckyball appear in places that it wouldn't normally be, reducing quantum mechanics to ironic placement. And everything can be ironically placed, these days, so it didn't really seem to have any point.
posted by klangklangston at 7:22 PM on January 20, 2008