DIRK SKREBER

In his work Dirk Skreber addresses everyday and often dramatic occurrences such as car accidents, floods and collapsing houses. Alongside from space-consuming sculptures such as the “Crash Cars” in Bonn’s Kunstmuseum, he uses the medium of painting in an impressively refined way. Using photographic source material, he employs a technically masterful and hyper-realistic style of painting that lies between objectivity and abstraction. In these paintings, Dirk Skreber depicts constructions of different behaviors expressed in the media and references to reality. He thus translates for example newspaper photos of catastrophes without a single human being in the picture. Void of humans, even more or less dehumanized, these portrayals display themselves as cultural-social memories and collective perceptions. The superficial sobriety and distance of his images develop an aesthetic pull of subliminal horror and a feeling of indirect danger. Despite the extreme coldness and emotionlessness, people still play a major role: as the viewer who exposes himself to these images, observing, disturbed and fascinated at the same time.

Dirk Skreber was born in Lübeck in 1961 He lives and works in New York.