Le Pigment de la Lumière

2015

Olaf Nicolai, Heidi Specker
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Spector Books

27 x 20,5 cm, 48 pages, 28 color images, 2 black/white images
ISBN 978-3-944669-58-8

Front and back cover of Le Pigment de la Lumière, Reproduction: Axel Balbini

Olaf Nicolai developed the work Le pigment de la lumière for the reconstructed Master’s Houses in Dessau. It involved coating the walls with marble dust with varying degrees of granulation to create a geometrical pattern, thus producing a subtle relief that responds to the changing light conditions. Heidi Specker gives Le pigment de la lumière a heightened sense of presence in her photography. Her pictures direct the gaze of the viewer to the contouring and the interplay of surface and space―a reflective phenomenon that is a calculated part of Nicolai’s wall surfaces.
In Nicolai and Specker’s joint publication, an aesthetic intervention in the reconstructed space is further extrapolated using the medium of photography presented in book form.

Various pages of Le Pigment de la Lumière, 2015