ESPEN KLUGE
Espen Kluge was born in Norway 1983, is a visual artist, composer and designer.
Espen Kluge is a polymath of renaissance proportions: A composer, a visual artist, and a creative coder. You may recognize his name as the composer behind the musical score for the Norwegian television show Who Killed Birgitte? As with his film scores, Kluge’s portraits series - which he has titled Alternatives - provides us with a thoughtful lens into the nuanced world of human emotion.
Espen has a fascination for the inward, exploratory and meditative yet chaotic qualities of the creative process, he believes this is, at least in part, a product of his own dealings with problems of bipolar disorder before successful treatment. He has a broad interest in many types of creative work, and he is active in several categories of it, and he likes to approach it by adding a sense of unfamiliarity, typically by using programming languages or tools/software that he is unfamiliar with, or setting up digital systems that adds elements of randomness into it.
His visual art tends to gravitate towards portraiture where the human face is used as a canvas for exploration and improvisation in code or otherwise. Fascinated with the link between the manipulated experience of reality that he experienced through his illness and the warping of human face on a digital canvas.
Inward exploration is central in all of Espens work, in his music and visual art, aiming his creative lens towards the spontaneity and semi randomness that occur in moments of improvisation. Espen composes music for Film and TV, his composition can be heard on most streaming platforms.
KVG exclusive interview with the artist can be found here.
ALTERNATIVES, 2019
Alternatives have been exhibited for the first time worldwide at Kate Vass Galerie in Zürich from October 30th, 2019 as NFTs & physical prints for a first time in the physical space.
About the work:
From the prehistoric skulls covered in plaster to the modern-day selfie, portraits have always been among the most important forms of visual art. Evolution has trained us to read the nuances of human facial expression with a higher degree of sensitivity than any other visual input, and for good reason. From finding a mate to sensing a foe, our ability to read subtle facial expressions is critical to navigating many of the most important and meaningful aspects of life.
Our supercharged sensitivity to these facial signals creates a playground for portrait artists like Espen Kluge who can combine, bend, exaggerate, and break these signals to manipulate us and make us feel with heightened intensity.
Kluge’s portraits feel monumental and architectural, reminding us of the sculptures of the Russian constructivists like Naum Gabo and Vladimer Tatlin. But in contrast to the somber character of the Constructivists, Kluge’s work explodes with a rainbow of color and emotion. Though the details of their expressions are abstracted into masses of colorful geometric threads, Kluge’s portraits display the full range of the human condition. This is especially remarkable when you consider that Kluge is working in the genre of generative art, often criticized for being cold, geometric, and esoteric. Kluge gives generative art a new direction with work that is warm, universally approachable, and equally accessible to both the heart and the mind.
Click below to browse the complete catalogue and the official website: https://alternatives.art
Lyrical Convergence #70, 2022. Print on thermo-aluminum with glossy finish. NFT is available on request and sold separately;
LYRICAL CONVERGENCE, 2022
As a continuation of his experiments with the data from ‘Alternatives’, Espen developed a new algorithm that created a new set of works, the Lyrical Convergence.
Espen has created a growth algorithm specifically tailored for the output of his figurative Alternatives portraiture, attempting to visualize their inner kismet. In contrast to the geometric structure of the original series, the result of the new series presents an organic-looking abstract form expressing intangible sensations. The monochromic background, the centralized shape, the converging lines, and the elegant colours are reminiscent of the art of Georges Matthieu, one of the fathers of lyrical abstraction.
The converging lines, which recall the cardiogram emphasis on colours, seem to interrogate the unconscious. The artist adapts the immediate and direct approach to the new algorithm that brings into question the subject's position with respect to the object. Espen exalts it with the projection of his code with the coherent intensity to which the algorithmic execution of fragmentary castellations of lines, fields and colour imparted a maximum objectification. He makes it a place almost independent of the artist's existence, the code, and the manifestation of art in itself. His series Lyrical Convergence is insemination in which subjective and objective, rather than being considered antonymous, hold a dialogue and form integration. Like the European abstractionists, Espen’s works express something personal, vibrant, and entirely imaginative, in other words - lyrical.
Lyrical Convergence comprises 100 generative works, seeded with the same dataset from his former Alternatives series, exhibited in both physical and digital form.
For more information visit Lyrical Convergence’s official website!
Espen Kluge, Drawing #7, 2021