Jorrit Tornquist

(Austrian, born 1938)

Jorrit Tornquist is an Austrian abstract artist. With a varied oeuvre of painting and sculpture, Tornquist’s focus is on the exploration of color and formal composition. Operating within the belief that color itself has an electromagnetic frequency that, when combined with the background noise of a place, interferes with our mood, his work strives to combine technological invention with emotional sensitivity. Throughout his artistic career, Tornquist has developed his own unique theory on the effects of color on human perception and emotion, combining the so-called structural-chromatic value with the sensitive-affective value of various hues in his work. Born in Graz, Austria in 1938, he went on to study architecture at the University of Graz and settled in Italy in 1964, where he acquired citizenship in 1992. He has participated in numerous prestigious exhibitions, notably including the 1986 Venice Biennale, and has published several books on his color and spatial theories.