Jurgen Ostarhild: 0,0,0
jurgen ostarhild: 0,0,0
serigraph on paper, hand signed in pencil
published in 2025
by comptoir des arts franches montagnes (cafm)
saint-brais, switzerland
printed by SYMETRIA, saint-louis
edition of 250, 30 x 30 cm in a frame of 32 x 32 x 3.5 cm
including wooden shadow gap frame
0,0,0: a global snapshot of non-objective art in the digital age
commemorating the 110th anniversary of kazimir malevich’s groundbreaking 0,10 exhibition (petrograd, 1915), the 0,0,0 portfolio is a seminal contemporary project that explores the enduring legacy of geometric and non-representational art worldwide.
the title “0,0,0” references the pure state of the color black in programming code, symbolizing the core principle of maximum reduction and universal applicability—a direct conceptual bridge to malevich's revolutionary "zero form."
this limited-edition portfolio gathers 30 original works by international artists, showcasing the vibrant, transcultural evolution of constructivist principles across different generations and continents. it is a visual dialogue between the historical avant-garde and the logic of our networked, digital world.
born in 1954 and working in berlin, ostarhild comes from the world of photography but has long since abandoned the camera’s traditional role of capturing reality. while yesterday’s artist looked at the horizon, ostarhild looks at the interface. he operates in the "post-digital"—a space where the image is no longer a window to the world, but a construction of codes, pixels, and algorithms. niemeyer gave us the line as a planetary dimension; ostarhild gives us the line as a data stream.
for the 0,0,0 portfolio, ostarhild provides the most literal and radical interpretation of the project’s title. his contribution is a forensic analysis of the "zero point" itself. ostarhild took a high-resolution photograph of kazimir malevich’s original 1915 black square and stripped away the pigment, the cracks, and the history. what remains is the raw machine language.
this work is grounded in ostarhild’s deep exploration of the "emigration of numbers," a concept by philosopher vilém flusser. flusser predicted that "the alphabet is about to be crushed by the numbers on the one hand and the images on the other". ostarhild resists this crushing. in his wider practice, such as the nondigitcolors, he explores the rgb color space where reality is defined by hexadecimal strings. by isolating the letter-based codes (a-f) from the numbers (0-9), he creates computer color codes that, paradoxically, consist of no numbers at all—establishing color as a linguistic construct as demanded by ludwig wittgenstein.