Holger Bär, "Crunched Numbers", 2019, Acryl auf Leinwand, 200 x 300 cm, Galerie Deschler Berlin
Holger Bär has spent many years developing and working with computer-controlled painting machines capable of transposing images, prepared in a certain way, onto canvas, pixel by pixel, brushstroke by brushstroke. For the purposes of encoding his images Bär has always relied on numbers as placeholders for colors, using certain algorithms to visually process them. By way of a music project where scores were to be transposed into colors, thus creating complex abstract images, Bär arrived at the idea of basing a series of abstract paintings on the numbers of the lottery. In certain instances the numbers from 0 to 9 were each accorded one of ten specific colors, in others all numbers from 1 to 49 were quantified and also painted in ten colors. Using various formats, the artist thus programmed his painting machines to paint all the numbers from the inception of the lottery drawings, supplementing these with works based on other number sequences.
