Nick
Laessing

Nick Laessing, born in London in 1973, studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and now lives in Amsterdam. Laessing‘s work has appeared in numerous international joint exhibitions and solo shows, for example at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and he has been awarded many prizes and grants, including the Henry Moore Foundation, the Royal Academy, and the Laurenz Foundation, Basel.

In his work, composed of sculptures, installations, films and drawings, Nick Laessing explores the border areas of science, probing its relationship to the inconceivable. Reflecting the utopian and romantic aspirations of many amateur scientists and mathematicians of the past centuries he designs and builds his own devices.

Often departing from historical research of inventions that never became mainstream or were short-lived, Laessingʼs sculptures and installations attempt to find the unexploited potentials in the obsolete or overlooked. Examples of this include: the Eidophone, an instrument through which the vibrations and resonance of the voice can create images on a surface and Spatial Harmonics, a mechanical installation that employs pendulums to create geometric drawings corresponding to the theory of harmonics. He has also worked with electrical machines alleged to harness energy from the atmosphere, as well as a radio first made by Friedrich Jürgenson to capture the frequency of the voices of the dead.