Space. Light. Color. Luisa Baldhuber, 28, plays with this in her work. She examines how the interplay of space, light and color influences our perception. “In this way, I question the limits of architecture and add a new spatial dimension to it.” Since 2020 she has been studying free art with Peter Kogler at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Luisa works with dichroic glass. This is coated in such a way that it has multiple color effects. Depending on the lighting conditions and the respective viewing angle, a different color appears. “I develop my work in the glass workshop in the academy. I use glass that has two color effects. The blue, transparent glass was intended for a test in which I tried to combine it with dichroic glass.”
“In addition, I use Photoshop to create digital images from photos that have been alienated with effects. Only a kind of color landscape is recognizable from the photos, no longer the motif. I then place these layers of color on top of each other,” says Luisa. She then prints the whole thing out, after which the print is placed behind the dichroic glass. Sometimes she also prints directly onto the glass. “But the idea came to me later and I had to find a company that would print directly onto the glass.”
“These are drawings with colored pencils from my exam work – at that time I painted walls with different colors and irradiated them with RGB light. This also changed the color effects.” These were sketches or a kind of preliminary exercise for how to create spatial constructs with monochromatic color surfaces. “Light, color and space are in constant interaction with each other in my work,” says Luisa.
With the color palette and the glass, Luisa watches the colors change. The combination of glass and the digital prints puts you in a kind of observation mode: “A bit like a playground, it encourages you to look and changes depending on the time of day and the incidence of light.” Only recently she showed her work in the paint shop of the celebration work. “People saw very different things in it, a game effect. You saw a different spatial construct each time.”
For her exhibition in the paint shop, Luisa mounted the works on a wall surface painted blue. “This results in several levels: first the exhibition space, the painted surface, the printed glass or the glass with the digital image layer and finally the glass with its mirror and color-changing effects, which means that it also takes up the real space again.”