Blood Speed

Whether car crashes, aeroplane disasters, tornados or other catastrophes – Dirk Skreber’s painting bewilders and fascinates one at the same time: his landscapes, empty of people and giving the impression of staged still-lifes, are grotesque and haunting. He works using photographic paradigms from newspapers or the internet and seduces the viewer with the alienation of familiar motifs taken from everyday life. Dirk Skreber’s reality appears to be in a constant state of change, fluctuating between an imagined world and one composed of memories. In stunning horizontal formats he magnifies the profusion of colours as well as the size and the dynamics of the objects to the absolute limit totally overwhelming the viewer. The landscapes disintegrate into individual parts of quite varying, even contradictory, degrees of reality. Comic - like illustrations are juxtaposed with hyperrealistic depictions and amorphous splashes of colour. With great virtuosity, the painting is presented through the materiality of the different surfaces – until Dirk Skreber parades its illusionary artificiality before our eyes again by accentuating the visual break between the surface and depth of the painting with haphazard splashes of colour. These painterly traces lead our gaze away from the motif and recall to our consciousness that what we are looking at is nothing more than a surface covered with paint.