Inspired by his late grandfather’s love of music and charting market growth, Michael DeSutter created “Counting Bars.” The collage series takes cues from business graphs and bar charts, reimagining them as visual representations of personal growth. DeSutter worked with eighteen years’ worth of Fortune Magazines inherited from his grandfather. While sifting through the publications dating from 1954 to 1972, he took clippings of various bars of color and organized them into groupings. To create each collage, DeSutter fanned a set of color bars and allowed them to fall organically onto a paper ground. He used the established locations to inform the final compositions, instilling a sense of movement.

“‘Counting Bars’ - the title itself a nod to my grandfather’s love of music, finds me looking at my personal growth over the past four decades, from rural middle-American to east coaster, and now west coaster, questioning what my relationship with my grandfather might be like if he were alive today."