HANS DEHLINGER & BETHA SARASIN | GALLERY

EXPANDED.ART is delighted to present CODED CUBES, a duo show by Hans Dehlinger and Betha Sarasin (1930-2016) at the gallery in Berlin. On view will be early works from both pioneers exploring the shape of the cube.

A fascination with cubes is visible in Hans Dehlinger‘s work from the very beginning of his artistic expression. Among his early drawings is a series of digitally manipulated cubes, originally produced in 1986/87 on a small pen plotter. Larger drawings followed as he gained access to a larger plotter in subsequent years. One of the works from this series, a silkscreen print of CUBE 4, was Hans Dehlinger‘s first contribution to SIGGRAPH in 1989. Today it is in the Digital Art Collection of the V&A Museum, London.

In 2024, a new cubes series by Hans Dehlinger will be shown, along with some of his earliest original plotter drawings from the 1980s.

"For me, the cube occupies a special position in the series of Platonic solids. As an architect, I see the cube as an extraordinarily beautiful body and a kind of primordial SPACE, both from the inside and outside. It is mathematically very simple, with twelve equal edges and six equal surfaces. It is always visually striking, whether shown with surfaces or just edges."

– Hans Dehlinger

Betha Sarasin explored the shape of the cube over a period from 1972 to 1988. Early works document how, even before the use of computers, Sarasin anticipated the generative creation of art through drawings, for example, by varying cubes composed of cut cubes. As early as 1979, she showed in an exhibition at the Hervé Odermatt gallery in Paris computer-aided examples of works resulting from the collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials in Freiburg im Breisgau.

For Betha Sarasin, the computer quickly became an indispensable tool for generative work, initially for spherical and cube cuts and soon for her animated three-dimensional cube spiral. She often combined her plotted spiral images with drawings, often much older ones.

In collaboration with Stiftung Betha und Teff Sarasin.