Wind Tunnel Drawings

Wind tunnels have existed for a good hundred years and their formative influence is unbroken. Today, there is no car or airplane that has not been tested in a wind tunnel.

Their history and the formal language of aerodynamics are closely linked to the history of modern art and design, although this has been unrecognized for decades. The pictures of the Futurists would be different without the formal language from the wind experiments, as would the German avantgarde "Der Sturm" or the Vorticists in Britain. Wind tunnels are the secret form-giving machines of modernity. And they themselves are of astonishing formal diversity. Every experiment requires a different tunnel; every experimenter a different tunnel design. The Wind Tunnel Drawings explore this in the medium of drawing.

You can't draw wind. You only see its effects. But you can draw wind tunnels. And yet, here too, the actual sculpture, the shaped wind inside the machine, remains invisible. "A safe space has become vacant. Under the hand of scientific law, an image has been imaged. This is the time to round off, finish and start with that which is missing and was broken off. The secret is not broken." (Sofie van Loo in her exhibition essay FLORIAN DOMBOIS: Isn’t it real what we make real?, "Round the Corner", Maison Grégoire, 2014)