Artist Philip Denker takes on new materials with impressive results

By Kristen Peterson

Wednesday, July 18, 2012 | 5:46 p.m.

Artist Philip Denker is known for his elaborate and meticulously hand-drawn images on paper, abstract forms created with a mathematical precision that seems to require an unimaginable patience and a solid understanding of form. Tedious, laborious and fantastic, the shapes made of intricate patterns take on a three-dimensional quality—tubular, basket-like, cylindrical, folded and/or stacked. 


In Screensaver at Winchester Cultural Center, Denker has taken a completely different direction with his medium, using pipe cleaners, corrugated plastic and acrylic to create large-scale works that appear flat, rather than three-dimensional. The assemblages reference the “sensory stimuli” of Las Vegas and, at first, seem woven like tapestries.

 Denker constructed the large-scale works by stacking the corrugated plastic and slipping snips of colored pipe cleaners into each cell, so that the color creates repeated patterns, interrupted by changing patterns, thus creating a sense of stopped motion, much like digital wavelengths.

 In one of the works, the pipe cleaners uniformly extend from the plastic, resulting in a shag carpet look. Once again, Denker delivers a clean, mathematical aesthetic through laborious work, this time using craft material to create slick abstract pieces that appear digitally created.