Dirk Skreber

Situated in the buffer zone between abstraction and figuration, geometricity and gesturality, Dirk Skreber’s rigorously painted Houses stand in an eerie environment where colourful drips of paint run across an ominous sky. The large, epic scale of the work and the breath given to the greying blue sky in the upper part of the composition contribute to creating an underwater effect. Here both space and time are suspended and all that is left is an uncanny silence and a feeling of paralysing calm.

Despite the fact that he chooses to catch his subjects in dramatic times - here the puddles and the mud on the ground suggest the aftermath of a flood - the artist’s attitude is always one of detachment. In fact, it seems that the content of his paintings is a vehicle for Skreber to explore formal issues and experiment with different styles and techniques.

Whilst the stark whiteness of the house and the mud-filled landscape are rendered with impressive precision, their details taken care of in a meticulous and attentive fashion, the sky is illuminated with explosions of upward-running drips of paint, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. As this work testifies, Skreber strives to challenge seemingly contradictory ideas of contemporary painting, the unanswerable question of the supremacy of figuration versus abstraction.