For Dirk Skreber, natural disasters, car crashes and near-miss train accidents become monumental icons of beauty. His epic paintings lovingly embrace catastrophe, offering a religious awe of their grim expectation. Depicted with high-gloss allusion to media imagery and viewed through the odd angles of a surveillance camera, Dirk Skreber's paintings are sublime mediations of death and isolation, rendered more intimate and appealing through the astringent sheen of consumerism.

German artist Dirk Skreber works in sculpture, installation and painting. Ranging from the abstract to the representational, his work is concerned with the architecture of the hyperreal: highly articulated constructions which reside in suspended space and time. His subject matter draws from the mundane flow of contemporary life: buildings, car crashes and natural disasters are treated with the most clinical formalism. His work offers the detached seduction of the sublime.

Often working in epic scale, Dirk Skreber's paintings monumentalise the banal. Figurative scenes of lone train carriages and road accidents aren't tableaux of narrative spectacles, but abstract incidents of incomprehensible beauty and horror. Rendered perfect in their making, their surfaces are impenetrable, exacting and serene; they don't offer spatial illusion, but vast fields of emptiness.

BIOGRAPHY

1961 Born in L'beck, Germany
Currently lives and works in D'sseldorf and New York

1982-1988 Studied at the D'sseldorf Art Academy

1994-1995 Visiting Fellow at the Karlsruhe Art Academy

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2004
Na(h)tanz Aspen Art Museum, Aspen
Muss et Sin Engholm Engelhorn Galerie, Vienna
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York

2003
Painspotting Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

2002
Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg
Galleria Gi? Marconi, Milan (with Bj'rn Dahlem) Galerie Luis Campana, Cologne
Galerie Elba Betinez, Madrid (with Bj'rn Dahlem)

Dirk Skreber uses the paint itself as a language of contradiction. Varying stylistically from seamless gradients to gestural rendering, his paintings don't offer pictorial illusion, but instead, exploit their own material qualities. Photography captures a single moment in time; Skreber's paintings are frozen in expectation.

In his more abstract work, Skreber transfers the sublime contemplation of modernism into a more frightening contemporary construct, where personal psychology is replaced by the public realm. Dirk Skreber presents trepidation as a normalised condition of collective consciousness, awe as a symptom of mass-media proliferation, and spirituality as an achievement of design.

What to Do Next...
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