About

Presented in association with Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles and the exhibition 'Sublime: Contemporary Works from the Collection' at QAG

In his highly innovative moving-image works created from the 1920s to the 1950s, avant-garde filmmaker and artist Oskar Fischinger (1900-67) brought together abstract art, cinema and music. Fischinger participated in a period of artistic experimentation and interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation in Germany following World War One, with artists developing ideas about light, cinema and abstract art alongside German Expressionism's cinematic explorations of light and shadow, as well as the Bauhaus experimentation with projections of light and colour. This program of preserved and new 35mm prints from the Center for Visual Music (CVM), Los Angeles, includes Fischinger's classic visual music films and rarely seen experiments.

INSTALLATION | Oskar Fischinger, Raumlichtkunst (Space-Light-Art)
The Gallery has recently acquired the HD video installation Raumlichtkunst (Space-Light-Art) c.1926/2012, a reconstruction by the Center for Visual Music of Fischinger's multimedia performances of film and music. This landmark work will be shown for the first time in Australia in the exhibition 'Sublime: Contemporary Works from the Collection' (Queensland Art Gallery, 30 August 2014 – 24 May 2015), after acclaimed recent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

LECTURE
Oskar Fischinger, Raumlichtkunst and Visual Music
Sat 30 Aug 1.00pm / Cinema A
Join Cindy Keefer – archivist, curator and Director of the Center for Visual Music – as she presents Fischinger's work and discusses CVM's preservation and promotion of his legacy, her new book on Fischinger, and the process of restoring the original nitrate 1920s film materials to reconstruct his historic performances as the HD video installation Raumlichtkunst.

'Optical Poetry: Oskar Fischinger Retrospective' courtesy of the Center for Visual Music, a nonprofit archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and abstract cinema. Prints were preserved by Center for Visual Music, Academy Film Archive (marked with *), and EYE Film Institute (Studie nr. 8), with the support of the Film Foundation, Sony, and private donors. Studie nr. 5 was preserved by CVM with support from EYE. For more about Fischinger www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger

List of Works

• [Spirals] c.1926
• [Walking from Munich to Berlin] 1927
• Spiritual Constructions c.1927
• Study No. 2 c.1930
• Study No. 5 1930
• Study No. 6 1930
• Study No. 7 1931
• Study No. 8 1931
• Coloratura 1932
• Kreise (Circles) (Tolirag Ad Version) 1933
• Muratti Greift Ein (Muratti Marches On) 1934
• Muratti Privat c.1935
• Komposition in Blau (Composition in Blue) 1935
• Allegretto (Early Version) 1936
• Allegretto (Late Version) 1936–43
• Radio Dynamics 1942
• An American March 1941
• Motion Painting No. 1 1947