Festival of Art in Public Spaces

Paul Panhuysen

Paul Panhuysen (born 1934 in Borgharen/ The Netherlands, lives and works in Eindhoven)

Paul Panhuysen is a composer, visual and sound artist. He creates sound installations, sound sculptures, performances and free improvisation, experimental music, electronic music.

He studied art at the Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht and sociology of art at University of Utrecht. He was the director of art school Vredeman de Vries, Leeuwarden, a member of educational staff of the Municipal Museum The Hague and of the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven. In 1965, inspired by the Fluxus movement, he founded an art group De Bende van de Blauwe Hand (The Gang of the Blue Hand), which organised exhibitions and happenings. Three years later he founded a group playing experimental music The Maciunas Ensemble.

Paul Panhuysen uses classical and electronic instruments, sounds of nature, odjects from various places. He looks for music in differents sources: vibrations in long and tight strings, the squeak of a canary, the noise that needle printers make, sound of oscillators, detectors etc. He began experimenting with "Long String Installations" in 1982, which he uses at concerts-performances or subjects it to nature and inner tensions. He has released several albums including "Paul Panhuysen and the Galvanos: Lost for Words", in which he used galvanometers and vibrating metal springs or "Partitas for Long Strings" recorded with an installation made of a long string.

In 1980 - 2001 he was the director of "Het Apollohuis" in Eindhoven. "Het Apollohuis" was an independent art space open to intermedia activities, experimental music and new sound structures refering to visual art. It held exhibitions, concerts, performances, symposia, festivals and lectures. An artist believes in new interdisciplinary qualities that are born from the correlation of various art forms. Art forms evolve in the process of interaction.

Panhuysen creates sound installations in different spaces. The structures mix with nature and architecture. His work "Little Souls Singing in the Sun" (2000) was an installation of the inside of Fort IJmuiden's well decorated with steel cables that formed a triangle spiral to which pots where attached. He put a piezo injector and solar cell in each pot so the volume of the sound depended on the amount of sun and the sound patterns were changing. Steel strings are often used as an element of his air installations - he hangs various objects on them which generate sounds.

In Lublin Panhuysen will present an installation called "A Pythagorean Prom". It consists of 64 small aluminium bells hanging on a string in Fibonacci's rhythym sequence, numbered from 1 to 4, tuned according to the Phytagoras chord 6 : 8 : 9 : 12. The installation will be placed on a tree and will "melt into" the surroundings while moved by the wind.