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Color from the Ordinary Made Into the Extraordinary: Fabian Oefner

From motor oil to evaporated alcohol Fabian Oefner wields these materials as if they were ordinary pigments found on an artist's palette. Known for driving a Ferrari into a wind tunnel to splatter with neon paint, Hefner does't shrink from using unconventional materials to pursue his fixation with color.

Hefner's latest series “Photographic Paintings” was an outgrowth of observing the oxidation of bismuth that he had melted on a hotplate. The cooled compound created amazing iridescent spectrum of color.  Oefner quickly realized that a scraped off layer  with a spatula would change the colors and that they would on be present for a brief tine. "You get those colors, which are essentially the colors of the rainbow,” he says. 

The photographs have a minimal amount of digital editing done to them. Hefner's work suspends your fools us by taken advantage of the interplay of possible—is it a painting or a photo?

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