ART CITIES:Berlin-Sven Drühl
The painter, mathematician, and art historian Sven Drühl is an multitalented artist of his generation. In his paintings, neon-objects, and drawings, Sven Drühl contemplates the relationship between pictures of the past and present. Nature, always desolate, is assembled from citations and digital landscapes. Empty urban spaces reflect outstanding modernist architecture: flat, calculated, digitalized, and yet highly painterly.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Haus Am Waldsee Archive
In the exhibition “Simulations-Landscape beyond reality” Haus am Waldsee places the focus on Sven Drühl’s landscape painting. Thanks to extraordinarily generous loans from private Collections the show achieves a broad survey of Sven Drühl’s output since 2002. He employs his signature abstract-planar technique to translate quotations by Caspar David Friedrich, André Derain, Edward Theodore Compton, Sebastião Salgado or Wolfgang Tillmans as well as digital computer graphics into pictures on pictures. He creates the visible from a previously reworked, abstracted reality. Using materials such as silicon, lacquer and oil Drühl mirrors a second, calculated and artificially constructed nature of the future. The works make use of the viral, simultaneous and simulated potential of our digitised present and mirror it without any false sentiment. Drühl creates his very own, cool realism that cites and interprets. The results are technically sophisticated paintings of spaces devoid of people but brimfull of a peculiar presence. The “Simulations” in the exhibition’s title at once refer to the profoundly scientific curiosity and analytical powers of the artist, mathematician and theorist, who has lived in Berlin since 2003. Drühl’s style of panting is planar and poster-like. Its colour scheme is oriented towards nature in its extremes. Sven Drühl works on parallel canvases in series that can be pursued, left alone, resumed, expanded and dropped altogether. With astonishing freedom he does not allow his success to impel him but decides instead according to his respective interest which thoughts are taken up again and carried and whichare to be jettisoned and abandoned. The result is a complex œuvre that generates concentrated, convincing art about art as a metaphor of our present, which has been digitised to our very thinking.
Info: Haus Am Waldsee-International Art In Berlin, Argentinische Allee 30, Berlin, Duration: 9/9-11/11/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.hausamwaldsee.de
