Dirk Skreber - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 13, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

  • Catalogue Essay

    German artist Dirk Skreber challenges seemingly contradictory ideas in contemporary painting such as abstraction and realism, color and line, beauty and catastrophe. The artist blends the photographic and the painterly, contrasting realities of daily life with art making. He does not strive for photorealism, but his work merely borrows the tropes of mechanical reproduction. Skreber uses banal objects and places of everyday life that are privileged as pictorial objects and uses the content as a way to explore formal issues.
    The present painting, Untitled (Train), depicts a distorted perspective of locomotives frozen in a moment of detached anticipation. Through its monumental scale, the mundane as the object of an all-consuming fixation is accentuated. Dirk Skreber uses the technique of adhering foil tape and foam rubber to create an abstract static view. This representation removes the work from all measurable qualities of perception. Its evocative quality is bridging an immense gap between charisma and disaster, a reflection of the numbing shape of contemporary perception.

45

Untitled (Train)

1999
Oil, aluminum tape, and weather stripping on canvas.
67 x 106 1/4 in. (170.2 x 269.9 cm).

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

13 Nov 2008, 7pm
New York