Art Director & Digital Image Maker Anders Brasch-Willumsen

Anders Brasch-Willumsen, is a Danish Art Director and Imagemaker who has a fascination with the natural world juxtaposed against the world of technology. Take his love of the Japanese art movement Mono-ha, which literally translates as “the school of things”. The Mono-ha artists explored the encounter between natural and industrial materials, such as stone and steel, glass and wood, paper and wire, leather and water. They arranged them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. The works focus as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves. Combine this with his interest in light and space, and his minimalistic aesthetic, and you start to get a feel for where his work has come from.

“I began thinking about my digital sculptures in relation to physical sculptures. The works that came out of Mono-ha would often be ephemeral and exist only in photographs. I felt connected to this idea because the outcome when creating digital sculptures is somehow similar – they only exist in images,” said Brasch-WIllumsen.

Take his Rocks and Light/Rocks and Glow series. It has a hyper-colour realism to it, not necessarily uncommon to digital artwork. But it’s Brasch-Willumsen’s use of stone that gives the overt perfection found in computer-generated images an edge, something to jolt you.

“I found that using age-old, raw materials like stone, completely changes your perception of the image and I wanted to create a space for this grey zone to take place, somewhere between the pre-historic and the futuristic – between the real and the virtual,” he said.

Brasch-Willumsen’s work is characterised by powerful imagery, narrative, and emotion. Exploring the boundaries between new technologies, traditional craft and the power of nature is what makes him tick. His Erosion series are a photographic interpretation of rock formations, mimicking the same process that nature uses to erode canyons but via the layering of photographs and then partial deletion of them, eroding the pictorial content of the canyon images he has photographed.

“Slot canyons are narrow canyons, formed by the wear of water running through rocks. This series has been created by stacking multiple photographs of slot canyons on top of each other, and over time, deleting parts of each photograph to reveal the underlying ones, resulting in a final image,” he said.

Or take his Matter matters series, all digitally produced but the sculptures look so realistic you would never realise they are all created in a 3D computer programme. For this production he was working on a series of small forms that he delightfully refers to as a “cabinet of curiosities”. His still life, CGI process produces sculptural elements that feel very traditional in form but are both contemporary and cutting edge. Brasch-Willumsen’s composition is a perfect blend of art direction, set design, industrial design and computer wizardy. We can’t wait to see what he conjures up next!