Tomislav Topić

Tomislav Topić is a Berlin-based artist who lifts colour off the wall and into space. Working with suspended mesh, thread and painted fabric, he builds large chromatic installations that are experienced by moving through and around them, changing as the viewer's position changes.

Born in Hannover in 1985, he studied colour design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim and at the University of Wisconsin–Stout, and came to the work through graffiti and chromatics. He was one half of the artist duo Quintessenz from 2008 to 2019, and has lectured at Hildesheim, at the University of Art and Design in Halle and at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Recent installations show the range of the approach: Echoverse (2025) filled a chapel in Châteaugiron with 451 painted mesh sheets in 57 colours, while Afterburn (2025) was strung above a street in downtown Pensacola for the Foo Foo Festival. Follow Long turned a pedestrian laneway in Beijing into a floating canopy of colour, and Interlude suspends 410 lacquered steel panels in 41 colours across a plaza canopy at One Holland Village in Singapore. He has shown in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Georgia, Qatar, Mauritius, China, Singapore, Japan and the United States.

Topić composes each work in response to its specific site. He suspends layers of mesh, thread and painted fabric so that colour occupies the air rather than sitting on a surface, then uses transparency, repetition and natural light to build fields that change as people move. Overlapping planes read as denser or lighter depending on the angle of approach, so the same installation gives a different image from every position. The palette and geometry are planned around the architecture — a chapel, a public square, a gallery — letting the existing space shape the composition. Movement becomes the mechanism: the work resolves fully only as a viewer walks through it.

The materials are industrial rather than painterly: PVC and fibreglass mesh hand-painted with lacquer or water-based enamel and hung from steel, and for permanent commissions lacquered or powder-coated steel. Layers set slightly out of register produce moiré interference and shifting optical fields, so perception itself becomes part of the work. Each project begins with a study of its context, and the result neither dominates the architecture nor disappears into it. Scale runs from gallery-scale pieces to a sixty-metre span above a Beijing laneway, and from temporary festival installations to permanent architectural commissions.