Artful Quandary

Science and art collide in the mind of artist Julian Voss-Andreae. The Bravern reaps the benefits.

Julian Voss-Andreae, Quantum Man, 2009, stainless steel, 126 x 55 x 25 inches

Julian Voss-Andreae’s new sculpture at the Bravern, Quantum Man, is beautiful to look at, but that’s not the point. The idea of the piece is to convey one of the most bewildering ideas in modern physics: that nothing is really the way it looks, that all matter can be seen as a bunch of particles or as a collection of waves. It cannot possibly be both, yet somehow it is.

Voss-Andreae, who grew up playing with Lego blocks in Germany, first decided to be an artist. Then, at the University of Vienna, he switched to quantum physics and started playing with buckyballs, tiny soccer-ball-shaped icosahedrons made of sixty carbon atoms. They’re called buckyballs because they look like the geodesic domes designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, the famous cousin of Seattle Art Museum founder Richard Fuller. Voss-Andreae’s team won fame by shooting a single buckyball through two openings at once, each a hundred times farther apart than a buckyball is wide. Impossible! But that’s quantum physics for you.

Inspired by Roger Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind, Voss-Andreae again changed his mind and switched back from science to art. Then, propelled by an irresistible physical force – love for his wife, neuroscientist Adriana Voss-Andreae – he relocated to Portland, Oregon, and studied sculpture at Pacific Northwest College of Art. In 2004, he started making giant buckyball replicas in bronze and other science-themed sculptures: ion channels, antibodies, quantum waves in iron atoms. Voss-Andreae swiftly became an art star, celebrated in both art and science publications from here to India to Russia. Everybody from the Scripps Research Institute to Nobel Prize winner Roderick MacKinnon bought his sculptures.

But the coolest is Quantum Man, a human figure made of parallel slices of steel. “When approached from the front or back,” says Voss-Andreae, “the sculpture seems to consist of solid steel, but when seen from the side it dissolves into almost nothing. This effect provides a striking metaphor of the dual nature of matter with the appearance of classical reality on the surface and cloudy quantum behavior underneath.”

He loves how his man looks in Bellevue. “This mall is really well designed and beautiful,” he says. “The location of my piece is fantastic. I like that the first view of the piece for the people coming up the stairs from the street level is the exact side view where the sculpture almost disappears. I positioned the piece to maximize that effect. I also like that this particular piece is close to Microsoft, a very scientifically oriented company with – despite all the criticism, which is partly justified – excellent products that have revolutionized the use of computers.“

What’s a scientist doing getting mixed up with art? Voss-Andreae justifies himself by quoting Albert Einstein: “If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of logic, we are doing science; if we show it in forms whose interrelationships are not accessible to our conscious thought but are intuitively recognized as meaningful, we are doing art. Common to both is the devotion to something beyond the personal, removed from the arbitrary.”

Ultimately, Voss-Andreae’s now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t man at the Bravern has one goal. “I want to increase the audience’s capacity to intuit the unfathomable deeper nature of reality.” And once you’ve fathomed it, it’s time to go shopping. •