Explosion Collages and the work of Fabian Oefner!
I first became infatuated with the work of Swiss artist Fabian Oefner several years ago from this post on ItsNiceThat which featured his brilliant experimental watercolor & ferrofluid photography. Really stunning work, the kind of work that is half art, half science, which is funny because just after I typed that I went to look at Fabian's Instagram and his bio says 'ARTIST | SCIENTIST'. Nice. Then just the other day I rediscovered his work without even connecting the dots that it was the same artist who did the aforementioned ferrofluid photography because this time it was his 'Explosion Collage' work that took my breath away, a complete stylistic departure from what I associated him with previously. Oefner's newest series is made up of black and white portrait photos that appear to be getting torn apart by a gunshot, like those photos you'd see in science class of a bullet going through an apple...the difference is, and this is the part I can't get over, he meticulously arranges this 'explosion' fragment-by-fragment, by hand, until the composition is complete. (You can see some behind-the-scenes images of him making the work on MyModernMet). Explosions are a pretty common theme in Oefner's work and this particular idea of capturing the very moment a subject is destroyed is nothing new, as his series 'Shootout' from 2009 shows where he used an airgun to blast apart Coke cans. Such cool work. I love how all his projects could live in an art museum or in a children's science museum, I think that's what is so inspiring to me about what he does. The sheer range of his body of work, the fun you can tell he has making it all, and the technical perfection that's required to do what he does just really made me a fan. Check his work at FabianOefner.com and see the entire 'Explosion Collages' series below.