Bridges 2025 Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design

Friedhelm Kürpig

Artists

Friedhelm Kürpig

Professor of Descriptive Geometry (retired)

University of Fine Arts Hamburg

Aachen, Germany

Statement

For the author, geometry has not lost anything of its fascination even after over fifty years of intense engagement with the subject. As an architect, he finds it a never-failing source of innovation and a symbol of eternal beauty. In his capacity as Professor of Descriptive Geometry at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, his most important secondary activity lay in the development and production of educational models as visualizations of geometric laws. These models were generally acquired by Technical Universities as learning material for lectures and seminars. Over the years the emphasis of his work has changed somewhat, and today he prefers to focus on the aesthetic rather than on the didactic aspects of his objects.

Artworks

Image for entry 'Rotunda' — Rotunda
17.0 x 37.5 x 37.5 cm
Maple wood
2024

The sculpture “Rotunda” is made of maple wood. It has eight-fold rotational symmetry and has one horizontal and 16 vertical mirror planes. Rotunda is composed of 48 pieces cut from an eight-sided prism, whose cross section is an irregular octagon. Each prismatic piece has first been cut at both ends at 45°, obtaining two perpendicular regular octagonal faces. 32 parts of it have been rotated by a specific angle, clamped in a three-axis vise, and milled off until one mirror plane appeared. Two mirror-symmetric pairs were glued together in a mould to obtain 16 Y-switches having three regular octagons as end surfaces. These octagons are the contact surfaces of adjacent parts, being mounted together by permanent magnets and glued afterwards.