Hans Dehlinger (German, b. 1939) is a generative artist whose algorithmically generated line drawings are executed on pen plotters. Trained as an architect, he became Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Kassel in 1980, where he taught until his retirement in 2004. His generative process spans a spectrum from one-pass drawings made without visual feedback to composite works built up in a sequence of steps.
He began working with programming languages and computers during his architecture studies at the University of Stuttgart in the 1960s.,In 1968 he worked as an architectural project manager on the design team for the Olympic Village in Munich, and he went on to complete an M.Arch and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.In the early 1980s he began to explore computers artistically, and in 1988 he was a founding member of Art & Com in Berlin.,He is a member of the The Algorists, an informal group of artists working with algorithmic processes.
Auf nach 1984! (1983), a plotter-and-ink work realized in six variations, was among his early plotter drawings, published in Prints & Plots: Computerkunst 86.In 1999, his Human Catastrophe series turned to current events with Kosovo Tables, a work built around a table counting Kosovo War refugees.In Yellow Tree (2001), later shown as YELLOW SHARE TREE_16_ON_BLUE, he built an entire drawing from a small root area of about 200 points, from which random generators grew polygons and lines that were then clipped to the frame.
His work has been shown across Europe, Canada, Russia, Australia, the United States, Armenia, and China, and is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois, alongside private collections.One drawing from his Cube series, Cube 4 (1987), is the piece held in the V&A's collection.,Kate Vass Galerie's “PHYGITAL” exhibition paired his 1980s machine drawings with contemporary generative art, drawing a direct historical line to Harold Cohen's work from the same decade.In 2023, his work appeared in the group exhibition “Techno Terrain: Nature in the Age of the Metaverse” in Berlin, where he showed YELLOW SHARE TREE_16_ON_BLUE and PINK in custom frames he made himself.In 2024, MUD Gallery in China gave him a solo exhibition, “Line Art”, reflecting his long-standing connections with the country's digital art scene.
