ROTTERDAM.- The solo exhibition Radiant by artist Nicky Assmann opened in TENT on Thursday 15 October. A majestically moving light installation, which occupies the entire front room, forms centre stage. Assmann combines her knowledge of science, technology and art in spatial installations in which the sensory experience plays the main role.

In her solo exhibition Radiant, Nicky Assmann (1980, lives and works in Rotterdam) utilizes light, mechanics and abstract geometry to create optic illusions with which she investigates the mental and corporal perception procedure. Against the background of our visual culture, in which the experience of reality increasingly takes place in the virtual domain, she returns to the corporal fundaments of seeing. In her artistic research, she combines topical technological developments with elementary physical processes.

The exhibition presents a number of room-filling works. Radiant is a dynamic ‘mobile’ sculpture in which optical patterns and colour effects appear, due to a precise balance between space, form, movement and light. The sculpture is reminiscent of the works of twentieth century artists such as Calder, Bridget Riley and Otto Piene, artists who developed a universalistic form language with their abstract-geometrical works, in an attempt to transform and redefine art. In 2011, due to her graduation project Solace, Assmann immediately became well-known on the international art stage. In this cinematographic installation, an enormous film of soap liquid is elevated and lit in such a way that a turbulent choreography of light, colour and flowing movements is created, which subsequently bursts and disappears.

In her works, Assmann frequently experiments with the properties, behaviour and aesthetics of materials in physical processes. The recent film work Liquid Solid (in cooperation with Joris Strijbos) shows the registration of the freezing of soap films in the open air at a temperature of 22°C. This work is the result of an investigation in cooperation with the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station of the University of Helsinki in Finland.

The installation Aurora (Studies) is based on a study of the oxidation process of a number of copper sheets. Assmann processes the material and in doing so she functions as a catalyst; gradually, almost invisibly, the colours and the range of colouring of the sheets change during the period of the exhibition.