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spectral revision (2013 – 2016)

Two hundred years ago the optician Joseph von Fraunhofer made a momentous discovery: The fanned-out light from the sun is not refracted in a continuous (rainbow) spectrum but is permeated by hundreds of fine lines. The secret of these puzzling lines was not clarified until decades later. Thus it was found that these lines, and so implicitly color in a figurative sense, represent a chemical and physical fingerprint of elements. Remarkably enough, this conceptual way of viewing the phenomenon of color has up to now found no follow-up in art. This new dimension of color is what the conceptual artist, Tim Otto Roth, visualizes and essentially uses to link conceptual art and color field painting. In From the Distant Past (2010/2011) Roth, under the influence of his collaborations with astrophysicists, incites color to speak in two different ways. He thus sets the colors, via their color intensity distribution curve, into a compositional relationship and so develops a new play of color forms.

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