Name Ellen Marx | Role Author | |
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Books Optical Color & Simultaneity, The Contrast of Colors | ||
Ellen Marx (born February 22, 1939) is a French-German visual artist and author of reference books about color.
Life
She was born in Saarbrücken, Germany, where she studied fundamental visual-research and graphic design from 1957 to 1962 at the "Staatliche Werkkunstschule", Saarbrücken notably with the professor Oskar Holweck, an artist belonging at this time to the ZERO group in Germany (Günther Uecker, Otto Piene, Heinz Mack). His work and his teaching should have a profound influence on the evolution of her own work. In 1962 Ellen Marx went to Paris and created two years later her atelier 40 km from Paris where she is still living and working today. After the research-works of E.Chevreul, Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, Ellen Marx has quantified objectively for the first time the color-relativity in her second book "Optical Color and Simultaneity". In parallel to the publication of this book in 1983, a solo-exhibition took place at the Center Georges Pompidou (National Center of Art and Culture)in Paris, France. The color-reliefs in this exhibition were interactive and changing constantly with the view-point of the spectator. Numerous other group- and solo-exhibitions were held in Europe,especially "Relief Concrete in Germany today" with the German artists of Concrete Art which was shown in 1981 in the Modern Gallery of the Museum of the Saar, Germany. In 1989 her French editor Pierre Zech published in the collection "Le Temps Apprivoisé" the book "Méditer la couleur" which examines in great detail the phenomenon of successive contrast.
Marx was invited to be the Keynote-Address-Speaker of the International Conference on Color Education which was organized by the University of Art and Design in Helsinki and which showed in parallel her work in an exhibition beside paintings of Josef Albers.
Since 2000 she has been conceiving her paintings with the computer.