Einar Thorsteinn

04.03.2005 - 08.04.2005
Space Fang Space
It is with great pleasure that Stalke Gallery opens the exhibition SPACE FANG SPACE by Einar Thorsteinn.

Thorsteinn (b. 1942, Reykjavik) has a formal education as an architect, and this domain’s pursuits within aesthetics and mathematics also characterize his career, although the way he has pursued these two areas is far from traditional. Thorsteinn has been a pioneer of experimental architecture, creating a dome-cube system, sustainable constructions and ecological buildings. But while his work has had a practical outcome, much of his research has also been on the theoretical definition of space, and how the human mind perceives reality.

These theoretical approaches have led Thorsteinn from architecture to art. But the developments within art and architecture over the past 30 years have also brought these two fields closer together, so that today it is not always easy to define where architecture stops and art begins. Whereas art may seem theoretical and opposed to the reality of architecture, Thorsteinn believes that reality is as plural as theory, and that aesthetics are not only to be found in the visuality of art, but also in the mathematics of architecture and geometry.

Thorsteinn has worked on a special area of geometry concerned with five-fold symmetry space, a new definition of geometric space. A symbol for five-fold symmetry space is the pentagon, the golden ratio, fractals and fangs. The fang, which has lent its name to the title of the exhibition, is a new way of defining and understanding space. While traditional architecture is based on four-fold symmetry spaces with boxes and squares with right angles, in nature, crystals also grow in five-fold symmetry space. What a cube is to four-fold symmetry space, the fang is to five-fold symmetry space. The cube and the fang have two things in common which they share with no other: when packed together they form a compact mass with no gaps, and when divided or added in certain ways they reproduce themselves, thus behaving like fractals.

With this exhibition, Thorsteinn asks the question: “Is it possible to find aesthetics in mathematics?” With the artworks exhibited, Thorsteinn presents a new way of defining five-fold symmetry space, a new way of constructing space in general. Thus he wishes to point out that, as there are different ways of defining space, there are also multiple ways of defining reality, defining the world. Thorsteinn wishes to question the concept of reality and present alternative realities in an aesthetic form, and wants the viewer to participate in this investigation, where the exhibition becomes the basis of a possible discussion, rather than a conclusion. Man has created one way of defining space by four-fold symmetry, but it is only one definition of reality. The fang and five-fold symmetry presented here by Einar Thorsteinn may give us an entirely new way of perceiving reality.


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