TYLER HANZEL
TYLER HANZEL
Tyler Hanzel is a contemporary artist whose work explores repetition, geometry, and the meditative potential of mark-making. Working entirely by hand with compass, ink, and paper, he creates intricate geometric drawings built through the continuous construction of circles.
Hanzel’s practice developed through years of travel and study, particularly throughout Europe and Italy, where he studied under two traditional fresco painting masters. Exposure to Renaissance painting, sacred architecture, mosaics, and historical systems of proportion profoundly shaped his understanding of art as both discipline and devotion.
Over time, the compass became central to his practice — not simply as a drafting instrument, but as a tool for exploration, repetition, and discovery.
In 2024, Hanzel completed a self-imposed project to draw 100,000 circles by hand within a single year, producing hundreds of works through thousands of hours of sustained manual process. He is currently continuing this effort through a decade-long project to draw one million circles.
Rooted in both contemporary abstraction and ancient geometric traditions, his drawings investigate themes of infinity, perception, unity, and attention. Each composition emerges through subtle variations in repetition, creating works that oscillate between architectural precision and organic movement.
Tyler Hanzel lives and works in Colorado. His exhibition in Aspen presents selections from this ongoing body of work.
WORKS ON DISPLAY
The Infinite Within
The first time I picked up a compass and began drawing circles, something in my life changed.
What began as curiosity slowly became meditation, then devotion, then prayer. I found myself returning to the same simple act over and over again: placing the compass on the page, drawing a circle, and watching another form emerge from within it. Over time, the process stopped feeling like I was inventing something and started feeling like I was uncovering something that had always been there.
Since then, I have spent thousands of hours drawing circles by hand.
In 2024, I set out to draw 100,000 circles within a single year. Hundreds of drawings and thousands of hours later, I completed that goal. Throughout the process, I made a commitment to create something new every time I sat down to draw. Even now, after drawing hundreds of thousands of circles, I have never drawn the same one twice. The compass reveals that perfection and variation exist simultaneously — that even within repetition there is infinite possibility.
As the drawings became more complex, I began witnessing patterns emerge that felt ancient, universal, and deeply familiar. Sacred geometries, hidden symmetries, spirals, interference fields, structures within structures — forms that appear not only throughout nature and the cosmos, but within our own bodies, thoughts, and consciousness. Through the act of drawing, I felt as though the underlying architecture of existence was slowly unveiling itself before my eyes.
Geometry is everywhere.
It exists in flowers, galaxies, shells, cathedrals, sound waves, atoms, memory, breath, and human connection. It is not only around us — it is within us. In many ways, it is us.
The philosophers and mystics of the past understood geometry as more than mathematics. They saw it as a language of creation, a bridge between the physical and the eternal. A path toward remembrance. The more time I spend with the compass, the more I understand why.
To me, the compass is a sacred instrument. It does one thing: it draws circles. Yet from that single motion comes infinite form. I sometimes think of it as God’s favorite tool — the same invisible geometry that shapes planets, seasons, cells, and stars expressed through the movement of a simple line.
These drawings are the result of that ongoing conversation.
They are records of attention, patience, wonder, and transformation. They are my attempt to slow down enough to witness the infinite detail hidden within existence and within ourselves.
These works were created slowly, patiently, and with genuine love. My hope is that the people who live with them feel some small part of that energy every time they return to them.