Daniel Pflumm
Exhibition “Techno Worlds”
Daniel Pflumm’s preferred medium is an electrical device: the lightbox. This apparatus gets used mainly for advertising purposes. Alongside Jeff Wall, Daniel Pflumm is considered the most important cultural producer who uses the lightbox for artistic purposes – although in a completely different way. The Swiss Berliner artist creates works formed by the phenomenon of the electric. In the early 1990s, Pflumm founded “Elektro”, a techno club that became legendary because of the DJs who played there. Along with the musicians Kotai+Mo, he released noteworthy records of the early techno scene on the label Elektro Music Department. As with these musical releases, abstraction and depletion are essential stylistic devices that also appear in his visual works. Pflumm’s lightboxes are minimalist structures, characterised by a rigid technical aesthetic. Because of their luminosity, they reveal their strongest effect in darkened rooms, relating to the ambience of a techno club, where light elements often create demarcations and guide orientation.
Clear forms and bright colours are no less distinguished in his works Untitled (Abbey 2) (2000) and Untitled (montblanc) (2005), both of which can be seen in TECHNO WORLDS. The omission of information, writings and signals as seen in commercial lightboxes, however, suggests a socio-critical, anti-capitalist perspective, which Pflumm has also expressed clearly in the creation of websites such as brutalo.com and seltsam.com.
Clear forms and bright colours are no less distinguished in his works Untitled (Abbey 2) (2000) and Untitled (montblanc) (2005), both of which can be seen in TECHNO WORLDS. The omission of information, writings and signals as seen in commercial lightboxes, however, suggests a socio-critical, anti-capitalist perspective, which Pflumm has also expressed clearly in the creation of websites such as brutalo.com and seltsam.com.
