Finn Wagner’s artistic approach is to generate a strong feeling of materiality that overcomes physical borders of media.
Finn Wagner works in the fields of sculpture, video art and 3D animation. His approach is to overcome physical borders of material by creating an understanding of materiality that occurs between different media. Through the use of immersive 3D animated videos, the visitor gets a feeling of a non existing material. This haptic understanding unified with the physical material used in the sculpture, makes both origins of materiality equal.
Finn Wagner lives and works in Cologne. He is the holder of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes scholarship since 2017. His works have been shown in exhibitions such as: European Media Art Festival at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Middlepart Gallery in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Art Cologne, Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna and Galerie Genscher in Hamburg.
Trapped in a glaze like in fossilised amber
HD Video / 08:10 min / 2019
The video installation “trapped in a glaze like in fossilised amber” by Finn Wagner deals with the unconscious psychological effects of the seductivness of glossiness. He employs elements of advertisement and satisfying videos on the internet. In Los Angeles Wagner built real objects and staged them in idyllic, commercial- and Insagram-like locations, this footage is connected with 3D-animated images. Archaic landscapes of the desert let the artificial objects appear technical sovereign and pure, like in a car commercial. The animations visualize crafts and their processes that are necessary to add glaze to an object. This virtual handicraft with its visually fulfilling, surface-changing reactions on materials, contrasts with real processes such as the lacquering layers of high-gloss on a matt car. The central video piece is flanked by two large, partially sandblasted panes of glass, behind the glass there are two rotating prints like in the advertisement in metro stations.