Angles Morts — LOHAUS SOMINSKY, Munich, 2024

Two-person exhibition: Harm van den Dorpel with Vera Molnár. Exhibition page: harm.work/exhibition/angles-morts.

The exhibition

LOHAUS SOMINSKY, a Munich gallery since renamed Lohaus Gallery, showed "new works by the artist Harm van den Dorpel in combination with works by Vera Molnár, who is known for her pioneering work in computer and generative art" (exhibition text). Molnár (1924–2023) worked with computers from 1968; Quatre éléments distribués au hasard, the 1959 work behind Pression des pairs, predates that.

Most of the drawings belong to Cloud Writings, which harm.work describes as an "ongoing series of plotter drawings on paper and PVC. Premiered in the exhibition Angles Morts." Beside them hung four Interpolations on millimetre paper, two generative works on screens (Anni and Pression des pairs) and one drawing made entirely by hand, Kapitulation. The drawings are on Hahnemühle, Terschelling and Fabriano papers, carton board (Scene) and millimetre paper. The series continued in Tokyo two years later (→ Cloud Writings, 2026).

Angles morts is French for "blind spots", the zones a mirror does not show. The exhibition text does not gloss the title. Its closing sentence, on "the historical role of women in computational art and their often overlooked contributions", supports the reading that the blind spot is art history's.

What the exhibition text claims

The text names the artists behind the show:

"Since 2019, Harm van den Dorpel has dedicated himself to researching artists such as Anni Albers, Vera Molnár, Charlotte Posenenske and Tauba Auerbach, who are known for their work with two-dimensional grid patterns. This research is part of his endeavour to explore his own roots in generative art and to identify his influences.

It should be noted that the artists listed are all women. In his research, Van den Dorpel recognises a dominance of female artists in the field of generative art. He considers a historical connection between the systematic arrangement of recurring elements in grid patterns and the craft of weaving, an activity traditionally dominated by women."

They are artists he researches, not all of them predecessors. Anni Albers (1899–1994) and Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) worked before or beside the computer; Tauba Auerbach was born in 1981, the same year as van den Dorpel. The text's claim about weaving is tentative ("he considers a historical connection"). The wiki develops the loom as a grid in Grid and Algorithmic Archaeology.

On Albers the text gives the story that the wiki treats as the clearest case of reconstruction:

"While it would have been technically easy to programme an algorithm that replicated her triangle patterns, it turned out that randomly placing the triangles did not achieve the desired aesthetic effect. Van den Dorpel realised that Albers must have formulated clear rules in her head, which she applied algorithmically to each cell of the grid. This realisation led to a deep respect for the invisible structures and thought processes hidden in the works of Albers and other female generative artists."

The method is the one his artist statement names (709): "In order to gain deeper insights into the inner workings and logic of a system we are required to disassemble it, to break it down into parts and to apply reverse engineering." The full account of the Albers reconstruction is on Algorithmic Archaeology.

On Molnár:

"Unlike Albers, Vera Molnár worked with computer technology, but it was very limited, had no screens and provided only simple outputs that she had to manually translate into physical objects. These processes were labour intensive and resulted in small imperfections, which Van den Dorpel particularly appreciates."

The text then describes his plotter in the same terms: it "draws lines in all directions and through the slow, mechanical movement creates unique and unrepeatable results that bring a human unpredictability to the digital works." The wiki's reading of such imperfections as the trace of a path between instruction and object is on Randomness and Pattern.

The text closes on the medium: "A recurring theme in van den Dorpel's practice is the instability of the digital medium, where any specific idea or form of expression is difficult to grasp. This instability avoids a fixed, definitive statement and emphasises an open system." It adds that "van den Dorpel honours the rigorous and visionary work of these pioneers".

The works

Embroidery. The harm.work entry, in the artist's words: "Unlike a digital printer, a plotter moves around the drawing area in all directions, lifting and releasing its pen to draw lines. In this particular drawing, for some black lines, I decided to leave the pen on the paper and not lift it when it moved to another location. This created unpredictable in-between "threads", reminiscent of the backside of traditional embroidery." The moves a plotter normally makes with the pen raised leave a mark here, for some of the black lines; see Process Legibility for the wiki's reading of such traces.

Interpolations. Red line constructions plotted on graph paper, in four quadrants. The series text on harm.work: "Series of plotter drawings that extend Hanne Darboven's Konstruktionen (1966) through interpolation. For each work, the lines of an existing Darboven construction are traced, and software then computes the lines that would lie between them — drawing out a continuum the original only implied. The results are plotted onto millimeter paper." His are.na channel Interpolations (January 2025) is described "Interpolations of works by Hanne Darboven". The four sheets shown here (I–IV) began a series that reached nine in 2025. They bring a fifth woman into the show, Hanne Darboven, whose Konstruktionen were drawn on graph paper too. Darboven and the series are treated on Algorithmic Archaeology.

Cuneiform. Horizontal rows of short blue, grey and beige marks fill the sheet like lines of script. The title names the wedge-shaped script pressed into clay from the late fourth millennium BCE, one of the earliest writing systems. harm.work gives the medium and size only, so the link between the title and the drawing's rows is the wiki's reading.

Kapitulation and Anni. Anni, generative software after Albers's triangle patterns (four works), runs on a tall framed screen leaning against the wall: a field of yellow, orange, grey and white triangles. On the next wall hangs Kapitulation, a pencil drawing by hand on paper, 30×30 cm, turned on its point. It is the only work in the show made without a plotter or code. harm.work gives no text for it; the wiki reads it alongside the later hand-coloured Beads on Meditative Labour.

Pression des pairs. A generative animation "inspired by the work 'Quatre éléments distribués au hasard' by Vera Molnár from 1959" (harm.work), shown here beside Molnár's own works. Its mechanics are described on Interruptions.

The other drawings. The Cloud Writings sheets are fields of short strokes whose orientation and colour follow rules that vary across the sheet. For Poles and Valley harm.work gives the rule: "Probabilities transition gradually based on the coordinates within the canvas (x/y)." Ascent is drawn on black paper; in Divide a pale wedge splits a red and ochre field. Girl/Boy Song takes its title from the Aphex Twin track; at 59.4×84.1 cm it is one of the three largest sheets, with Atlas and Current.

Works in this exhibition

See also

• Algorithmic Archaeology — the Albers reconstruction, Darboven and the Interpolations, Molnár, Auerbach
• Cloud Writings (Tokyo, 2026) — the series' first solo showing at Takuro Someya Contemporary Art
• Interruptions — Pression des pairs and Molnár's line fields
• Meditative Labour — Kapitulation and the Beads
• Grid — the grid, weaving and the women's lineage of rule-based art
• Early Plotter Drawings — the artist's note for the same gallery's 2026 summer show