There aren’t many artists who work in pairs, but sometimes teaming up with other talents can be quite a way forward. This is exactly what the Berlin art duo Quintessenz, consisting of Thomas Granseuer and Tomislav Topic, demonstrates. The two artists began collaborating at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim, Germany, and since then they continue to work together and to develop their joint visual world.
After discovering art through graffiti, the two artists created their signature visual style mixing graffiti culture, chromatography and installation. Space is a fundamental source of inspiration for the duo, who work mostly in situ and draw their ideas from architecture while wanting to create works that interact with the environment.
Like the painter facing his canvas, the Quintessenz duo dresses buildings with murals and installations. The result is different projects, such as a monumental installation on the island of Paxos in Greece, for which the artists spray-painted fabrics that they then hung to form a series of gradients. The combination of these colored squares creates optical illusions and hypnotizing depth effects, but this juxtaposition can also remind us of the pixels of our screens — and plays with the impression that the world around the installation has ‘glitched’ the way video games do.
