An Astonishing Conversation with Julian Voss Andreae

Photo credit: Kathleen Wendland

Julian Voss Andreae is a German sculptor who lives and works in the US and is internationally known for his strikingly large-scale sculptures blending figurative sculpture with scientific insights into the nature of reality. His sculptures have been shown in international fairs, galleries, along with other major art spaces. Julian’s sculptures are displayed publically around the world and in major collections in North America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia. I had the honor of asking Julian about his use of the nature of reality in his art, what themes he addresses in his art, and what is his philosophy on art.

UZOMAH: Can you name another artist who you saw and their art was really captivating?

JULIAN: Sure, there are several. This is hard to answer because different artists do such different things. Focusing only on fellow sculptors who are alive today, Anish Kapoor comes to mind, Ai Wei Wei, Olafur Eliasson, Dale Chihuly, Antony Gormley, and Jaume Plensa. I also always enjoy seeing the creative output of people like Luke Jerram and Emil Alzamora, and so many others I probably forgot to mention now!

Spannungsfeld, 2014 Stainless steel and granite 12' x 70' x 6' (4 x 21 x 2 m) Location: Physics and Nanotechnology Building, University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)

The installation consists of a female and a male kneeling figure, 60' (20 m) apart on a plaza. The figures virtually disappear when the viewer crosses the figures' line of sight, evoking the paradoxical nature of quantum physics. To get a sense of the interactive qualities of the piece, please view this video clip of "Spannungsfeld" (2014).

U: With 'Spannungsfeld', how do you make the sculptures appear as if they were disappearing?

J: The “Spannungsfeld” figures are part of a body of work that was inspired by the matter waves of quantum physics. They comprise slabs of polished metal, arranged parallel to each other and with gaps in between them. When the viewer crosses the line of sight between the two figures, each metal slab is viewed on end, so only a fraction of the material is visible from that vantage point and the remainder of the cross-sectional area reveals the space behind the works, making them appear transparent. In addition, the polished stainless steel reflects the lights and colors of the environment, making the visible portion blend into the surroundings and therefore almost disappear as well.

U: Has your career gone the way you planned?

J: I have never really planned much in my life, including my career. I have switched my path radically a few times during my life and that was certainly not premeditated for a long period. What I have done though is to do everything with my whole heart and give 100% and then things began to materialize slowly over time. I feel that giving 100% is necessary to achieve success but it is certainly not sufficient. I think people who are successful on this worldly plane in the sense that they achieve a certain measure of fame and fortune, have gotten there because, in addition to their putting all their energy into the work, they typically have also had a good measure of ‘luck’; they were, for example, at the right place at the right time, etc.

U: How do you keep your hands able to work for long periods of time?

J: I do not work much with my hands on the physical fabrication of the sculptures anymore. In the beginning, that was most of my time spent, but now I create the designs and generate all the parts in order to bring them to a point where our team can turn them into physical structures. My trick to keep going is that I do whatever I feel like doing in every moment and I switch from one task to the next in a fairly organic fashion, with a continually updated list of priorities in my mind. There is always so much office work, emails, bank stuff, payroll (or answering interview questions), etc. mixed in with the various design tasks. Some work requires laser-like focus, whereas other tasks are almost mechanical and I can listen to podcasts or music at the same time and regenerate. In short, there is always a variety of tasks to stay fresh when I hop from one to the other. I work on two computers simultaneously and that also helps a lot in the juggling of different tasks.

Our Single Garment of Destiny, 2021 Stainless steel and programmable LED lighting 10’-0” x 6’-11” x 6’-5” (3.04 x 1.94 x 2.11 m) Weight: 5,840 lbs (2,650 kg) Location: Washington Gladden Social Justice Park (Columbus, Ohio)

Link to video clip (day): https://youtu.be/f9X_5Dcijs0

Link to video clip (night): https://youtu.be/CYbo-q3f2IM

Link to TV coverage: https://youtu.be/mFao0UrfEJ0   

This sculpture, with its quantum wave-like structure, serves as a dual metaphor: how a small group of diverse -yet unified- people can build movements for social justice, creating ripples that emanate and can grow into waves of transformational change; it is also a metaphor that despite differences in race, religion, gender, sex, ability, age, and species, we are all part of a single living ecosystem and inter-related structure of reality. When we cause harm and suffering to others, we are simultaneously inflicting suffering upon ourselves. If we can transcend the ultimately artificial notion of being separate from each other, and instead act as part of the same oneness, a single garment of destiny, we would be capable of healing ourselves and the world from the existential crises we are facing.

U: What about sculpting made you decide to pursue it for a career?

J: When I was younger, sculpture did not resonate much with me, but I loved drawing and painting. I made my first ‘real’ sculpture at the age of 29 while working as a physicist. Shortly after that, I enrolled in Art College, and in one of the first foundational classes there I made a mitered-cut sculpture. Going from one-dimensional (1-D) building material (such as lumber with a square cross-section) to a three-dimensional (3-D) object by virtue of rearranging the material through the application of compound mitered cuts, reminded me of how nature goes from 1-D DNA to 3-D bodies via chains of amino acids folded into proteins, and I started using mitered cuts to create sculptures inspired by and based on proteins. I realized that, unlike illusionistic 2-D art, the sculpture is incredibly honest in its very nature in the sense that it cannot hide well what it is – namely crafted material – and I sensed that our current stage of technological evolution has a lot of things to offer for creating 3-D structures, and probably not nearly as much anymore for the advancement of 2-D art. It has, for example, been over 100 years since most of the new pigments were invented that triggered new art forms such as impressionism and fauvism. In contrast, the field of 3-D printing and 3-D scanning is brand-new and is bringing a renaissance to sculpture that seems comparable only to the advent of metal casting during antiquity.

U: Are there any themes that are your favorite to address in your sculpting?

J: I love what we learn about nature in science, in particular the lessons quantum physics has to offer on our understanding of reality. I am also fascinated by the workings of living beings and both interests have had a deep impact on my work.

Quantum Man, 2007 [that one was sometimes called  Quantum Man II] Stainless steel 100” x 44” x 20” (2.50 x 1.10 x 0.50 m) Location: Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale (Wash.) and private collections

Drawing direct inspiration from my background in quantum physics, "Quantum Man" views the human body as a moving quantum object. Made up of vertically oriented, thin stainless steel sheets, the sculpture seems to consist of solid metal when seen from the front, but virtually disappears when seen from the side.

Isabelle, 2018 Stainless steel, concrete, and programmable color LED lighting 12' x 12' x 10' (3.70 x 3.70 x 3.00 m, incl. plinth) Weight (steel portion): 2,500 lbs (1,200 kg) Location: Palms Springs, California

"Isabelle", a monumental female figure comprised of vertical slabs of polished stainless steel, reinvents the ancient art of figurative sculpture. From some viewing angles, the unique style accentuates the graceful and timeless form, while when viewed in the direction of her gaze the figure disappears into a ghost-like abstraction. Computer-controlled color LED lighting illuminating the interior and exterior of the sculpture further accentuates this work's enigmatic and ephemeral presence.

U: A lot of sculptors find it hard to store their projects after an exhibit that is not permanent. How do you deal with it?

J: I have a hard time throwing anything away. Three of my early works dating from 2004 to 2006 adorn my front yard. I also have a few older works in my studio but from a certain point on I was fortunate enough not to have to keep too much because almost all of the sculptures were eventually sold.

Kundalini (Amethyst) - edition 4 + A/P Stainless steel 316L and polished natural stone spheres 78” x 16” x 13” (198 x 40 x 34 cm)

U: How do you incorporate the nature of reality in your sculptures?

J: I wish I knew what the nature of reality was! Much of my work is connected to my deeply felt sense that what we (in the tradition of the currently prevalent materialist-reductionist paradigm) assume to be a reality, this thing ‘out there’ that exists independent of us, is not only false but also prone to misleading us about the world - with disastrous consequences. My own main impulse toward transcending that destructive notion of ‘reality’ comes from my interest in quantum physics, but I believe you can also approach it from complementary directions, for example through plant medicines, meditation, and other spiritual practices, as developed in many ancient wisdom traditions all over the world (and much more recently re-discovered under the heading of ‘new age’).

U: How has your studying in the field of science such as quantum physics influenced your sculpting practice?

J: The idea for my body of ‘disappearing’ sculptures was directly inspired by my work I had done as a physicist before I went into art. I studied physics at different European universities for a number of years and ended up doing my graduate research with Anton Zeilinger in Vienna, in a research group specializing in fundamental questions of quantum physics with a deeper philosophical interest. We set out to show that even fairly large pieces of matter still behave as quantum mechanical waves and we used Carbon-60 molecules, the famous ‘buckyballs’, to do that. After this experiment was a success (see https://julianvossandreae.com/wp-content/uploads/1999/12/c60article.pdf), I started looking into other, even larger candidates for such experiments – the crazy dream was for the observer to eventually be the quantum object yourself, getting sent through the experiment as a wave and being detected again as a particle – how would that feel like? That idea, to think of myself as a quantum object led in 2006 to the idea to create a stylized walking figure titled “Quantum Man”, consisting of parallel slices with gaps in between, arranged like the wavefronts in the quantum mechanical wavefunction that would describe that motion.

Synergy, 2013 Stainless steel and colored glass 20' x 4' x 4' (6 x 1.20 x 1.20 m) Location: Center for Integrative Proteomics Research, Rutgers University (Piscataway, New Jersey) "Synergy", for Rutgers University’s Center for Integrative Proteomics Research (CIPR), shows off the beauty of proteins and serves as a metaphor for the institute’s multidisciplinary research. Utilizing protein structure data from the Protein Data Bank housed at the CIPR, the sculpture is based on the structure of collagen, the most abundant protein in the human body.

U: Have you ever felt more needed to be done to a piece after you declared it finished?

J: Yes, in some cases I wanted to change something after it was done. These days it is typically a bit different: I start a new edition and the first one or sometimes the first two are ‘artist proofs’ where I tweak things until I like everything and then the official edition starts where the design is kept the same.

Quantum Reality (Large Buckyball around Trees), 2007 Douglas firs and steel Diameter of the structure: 30’ (9 m) Location: Private collection (Portland, Oregon) A 30’-diameter steel "buckyball" surrounds a group of trees, floating above a small creek in a park-like setting. The buckyball structure, a cultural construct, is intimately connected with nature, represented by the living trees it surrounds and the park it is situated in.

U: What are you currently working on?

J: We are currently finishing up a public work for the San Francisco Bay Area. It depicts a large sitting woman holding a tablet device. Color-changing light will stream through the tablet, illuming her face. The base she rests on is buoyed by a cushion of slowly changing light as well.  The work was conceived before Covid, but I have begun thinking of it as a monument to the pandemic where we were all forced to merge a lot more with our electronic devices than before, streaming a lot of our social contacts through the internet.

Also, we are working on a number of gallery works of which three new ones will premiere at Art Miami in December 2021.

Elective Affinities, 2018 Stainless steel 89" x 82" x 26" (226 x 209 x 66 cm) Location: Private collection (Palm Desert, California)

A standing male and female figure leaning against and pushing each other, in a pose suggesting opposition as much as an attraction. The hands, pushing into the opposite figure, seem to merge with the other body. The heads morph into one, with the faces touching, sharing common metal slabs which

U: What is your philosophy about the arts? How do you make it a part of each sculpture?

J: My view in general is to try to do what I am passionate about and have faith that this will result in meaningful art. When I make a new work it needs to have something that really interests me. Even if that something is beyond words or cannot be captured within a simple intellectual explanation. It needs to feel like it has meaning beyond a single ‘one-liner’ interpretation; it should have the ability to resonate on different levels. If I feel that is the case I tend to just pursue that idea even if I do not have a client or if I am unsure about how likely the final product is to sell in a gallery.

For more information about Julian’s artwork please visit his site and follow his Instagram.