Light and time have been defining constants in the oeuvre of Inge Dick for many years. And her approach has always been radically minimalistic, exclusively capturing for instance “white“ as the colour of light over long periods of time. She uses a wide range of media: pigment paint, Polaroids, analogue film stock and, most recently, the data stored directly on digital chips. In a setting that is itself almost clinically white, she shoots films over long periods of time that record how the light in the artist’s studio changes throughout the day. The data in turn yields large-format images through extraction and offsetting on a particular plane, with eloquent titles like winter licht weiss (winter light white). Her artistic work explores light with minimalist methods that have a direct impact, with the artist’s interventions limited to a minimum of technology. Nonetheless, the films and image surfaces created are fascinatingly colour-intensive, making the experience of the actual composition of the white light highly sensuous.

Inge Dick lives and works on a farm located right on the Mondsee lakeshore, with large sections of the farmstead converted into spacious, meditative studios. These rooms bathed in natural daylight look right out onto the lake, with the shimmering light from the water’s surface reflected onto the studio walls, creating the ideal working environment for her studies of the aesthetic properties of light. While she herself is grounded through her studies of Zen Buddhism and Japanese ink drawings, her influences go back to the purist aesthetic of the German artists’ group ZERO. Indeed, her oeuvre is often mentioned in connection with minimal art and concrete art.