Nicky Assmann
The immaterial and intangible character of light, colour and motion forms the starting point of Nicky Assmann's [NL] spatial installations, in which she endeavours to heighten the perception. With a background in Film and ArtScience, she combines artistic, scientific and cinematographic knowledge in experiments that use physical and chemical processes. By implementing natural and optical phenomena she creates visual music compositions for an immersive and sensorial experience. The resulting visual, kinetic, and spatial compositions evoke sensory interference in self-created and often ephemeral macro-universes.
In the lineage of expanded cinema, Assmann experiments in her work with the different components of the cinematic apparatus. She creates her own screens with materials that range from iridescent soap films, heat-stained and chemically-treated copper sheets, to metal grids and kinetic transparent plates with moiré patterns. Her work takes shape in the form of kinetic light installations, video-installations and performances. Besides expanded cinema, her work is embedded in a context of visual music, synaesthesia and what Assmann calls hypercolour. The sun inspires her work in a perpetual quest for hypercolours – they are brought out by its light and occur both in nature and the digital colour spectrum. Hypercolours are characteristic for her work.
In using distorted mirroring materials, she challenges preconceived notions of our surroundings to open up space for parallel realities. Set against the backdrop of a visual culture whose reality is increasingly perceived in the virtual domain, she returns to the physical foundations of seeing in which the embodied experience and the notion of affect are central.
Assmann's work Solace gained an Honorary Mention in the 2011 StartPoint Prize. She has exhibited her work in a solo show at TENT Rotterdam, in solo shows with Macular collective at the MOCA Yinchuan [China], Wood Street Galleries [Pittsburgh] and Boxes Art Museum [China], and in group exhibitions at ao. the Saatchi Gallery [London], National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Art Rotterdam Week, Quartier 21 [Vienna], V2_Institute for the Unstable Media [Rotterdam], Exit Festival [Paris] and the Biennial of Carrara. Recently, she made her first permanent public artwork, the LED video sculpture Wervel [Turmoil] for Forum Groningen.
Assmann holds a Bachelor of Arts in Film Science from the University of Amsterdam and a Master in ArtScience from the Interfaculty of the Royal Conservatoire & the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She is part of the Macular collective, which focuses on art, technology, science, and perception.