Tobias Putrih

So, I recently finished the Art 107 cardboard box self portrait project.  I didn't do a great job.  Well, I did an okay job, but it was not my most creative hour. I ended up with what everybody else ended up with "This is what you see on the outside, this is what the REAL me looks like!"  It was almost as if the limitlessness of the cardboard box as a material intimidated and stunted me.  It could also be that I had a god damn stop motion film production on the brain.  Any who, I came across the artist Tobias Putrih who has done some pretty neat things with corrugated cardboard recently.  His work also really reminds me of the artists who do book carvings and various book art.

 

Macula Series A&L, 2005

 cardboard, dimensions variable 

Macula Series, 2005



Re-projection: Hoosac, 2010 mono filament & spotlight


 “Soap Film Models,” 2010, wire and soap

The work of Tobias Putrih has something very familiar about it.  His use of the everyday, the ephemeral, and the disposable would fit nicely into our 108 class curriculum.  I thought I was going to talk about the cardboard sculptures because they loosely pertain to a project in 107, but my gosh, that last image of the "soap film models" would have made a pretty mind blowing skeleton-skin project. 

The sculpture appears to be pretty large (don't have the exact dimensions for this piece)  It is a wire structure that hangs from the ceiling.  The lines are curvilinear, organic and biomorphic, while at the same time there is a rigid, structurall facet to this piece that makes it quite architectural (as is typical for much of Tobias' work).  The viewer is actually invited to dip the sculpture into a vat of soapy water via a system of pulleys.  When the sculpture is pulled from the bath.  Shimmering, iridescent, films of soap span the spaces between the wire.  The idea idea of the soap film model comes from the work of famous architect Frei Otto, who actually used the soap film to visualize the smallest surface area needed to close a structure frame.  I like this piece because one, its frustratingly cleaver, two, the viewer gets to interact with the art and that is just good fun, three bubbles are pretty, and especially delicate against the heavy black wire of this sculpture, four, this sculpture is in a constant state of change.