Abstraction
Oskar Fischinger
OSKAR FISCHINGER, 1943. OIL ON PANEL.
How can music be made visual? This was the question, decades before it entered the public consciousness, that Oskar Fischinger was asking. A pioneer of the a modern renaissance of the art form known as Visual or Color Music, Fischinger was a German emigree to the United States, who’s work in Germany had been banned under obscenity laws. Fischinger created colourful, abstract animations composed tightly to musical pieces so to expand the audio world into something engulfing of all senses. His work is optical poetry, affecting and hypnotic while being undefinable. What Kandinsky had done of the canvas, Fischinger did in motion, hand drawing thousands of cells of undulating, expanding, exploding circles that seem to dance in harmony with their orchestral soundtrack. Though he worked mostly in moving images, Fischinger’s many paintings seem imbued with the same life as he films, and you can almost hear the music in his abstract landscapes.