Bernd Preiss

Bernd Preiss was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His curiosity and his passion for science and nature will lead him to devote his professional life to high technology and physics which will naturally feed his conceptual and aesthetic curiosity. His research work will thus become the springboard and the method of an artistic interrogation of the world of fractals. Fractals are a branch of mathematics conceptualized by the Franco-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot around 1975. An integral part of chaos theory, they have contributed to giving mathematics a visual and almost sensual dimension, to use Mandelbrot's own words. Fractals do not begin to take their scientific and artistic development that thanks to the immense capacities of calculation of the computers of these last decades. In 1980 Benoît Mandelbrot said that for the calculation of only one of his simplest drawings, therefore of the simplest of his fractals, a mathematician would need several centuries. Fractals, the best known form of which is that of the snowflake, are found in nature at all levels of scientific work and constitute for Bernd Preiss an inexhaustible source of inspiration. He is fascinated by this new discipline of mathematics, generator of a new art which invites him on a journey to the borders of reality and dreams. In his process of creating a visual response, Bernd Preiss does not use brushes or paints. Thanks to the immense calculation capacities of computers implementing an inexhaustible variation of mathematical functions, he creates artistic fractals whose great beauty and diversity then lead him into an infinite and phantasmagoric world. The possibilities of modern technology allow him to print his pictorial compositions on various supports and in all desired formats: on canvas, special fabrics, plexiglass, glass, metals such as stainless steel or copper, on wood, slate etc. Through an unprecedented panorama of his creations, Bernd Preiss opens the doors to a fascinating universe where surprisingly complex shapes, buried in the depths of our unconscious, resurface as from the depths of the Abyss, made visible by the creative act ...