Mads Gamdrup

About

Mads Gamdrup (b. 1967) works with the potential of monochromatic photography and its strength as artistic statement in relation to a number of phenomena, such as distance, transparency, spirituality and materiality. Gamdrup explores the boundaries and possibilities of photography using Newton’s and Goethe's colour theories. Using a special technique called Monochrome Colour Noise each colour's exceptional resonance is manipulated by creating degrees of transparency within the individual colour unit - from pure colour to pure light. Gamdrup uses a colour palette assembled over the years from the pixelated noise, which has come into being in the transfer of his own analogous photos to digital ones. In the darkroom he has defined the colours on paper via different wavelengths of light, visualized as gradings of stripes, drips, or bubbles.

Faced with these grand photos, the spectator is exposed to a plethora of flickering, dizzy colours, tricking the eye into perceiving them as vibrant and practically breathing entities. The figurative object of the photo is removed, and the abstract appearance makes the works resemble Klein and Rothko’s monochromatic paintings more closely than they do photographs. By using the photo's technical starting point as an explicit basis for his beautiful colour compositions Gamdrup singles out a historical ambiguity between art and technology in this medium.