SVEN DRÜHL: MOUNTAIN HIGH!
Media historian and author Norman Klein writes in the beautifully crafted, newly released ANNUAL MAGAZINE of the Berliner Festspiele: The future ages faster than the present. Sven Drühl, a Berlin-based artist, PhD in art history, and passionate swing dancer, states in the 119th edition of the ARTIST-CRITICAL MAGAZINE OF THE PRESENT dedicated to him: "Art does not emerge in a vacuum, but always in relation to earlier works and the codes that constitute them. In my opinion, every artwork is a conglomerate of historical references – it is created through the absorption and transformation of other artworks."
In 2006, Drühl created his first landscape painting entirely in black, which he titled Undead. In this and other works, he referenced significant 19th-century artists whom he considers "undead," such as the French realist Gustave Courbet, the representative of "heroic" landscape painting Joseph Anton Koch, and Weimar artist Edmund Kanoldt.
In 2008, he followed this with T.R.C.D.F. (Undead): here, the artist used a watercolor by his contemporary Tobias Rehberger for the mountain panorama. The flowers and plants in the foreground were derived from a plant study by Caspar David Friedrich from 1799. Both image sources were layered together in such a way that they completely merged. The process of creating this work essentially describes Drühl's approach. He articulates the concept behind his paintings as follows: "My paintings are something like remixes of existing works, similar to how a DJ in the house or techno scene reassembles individual music tracks or layers them to arrive at new solutions. A music genre that strongly influenced me at the beginning is the so-called Bastard Pop (…) where music pieces from very different areas are mixed together, like Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance with Somebody with a piece from Kraftwerk called Numbers."
While this form of sampling long defined the artist's image creation, he has recently often refrained from processing templates from an art historical context. Instead, Drühl draws on virtual images, on non-images, which he sometimes finds on the internet. In the current case, he is working with motifs provided by companies that program video games. These fictional templates are brought back from their artificiality into the reality of painting.
He describes a path from the supposed future of image creation into the reality of a present that dares to ask whether the future truly ages faster than the present. In times of uncontrollable virtually created realities, in times of scandals involving millions of stolen data, Drühl captures the virtual image for a moment and realizes from this moment both history and future.
The exhibition MOUNTAIN HIGH! brings together eleven mostly studio-fresh paintings, including eight based on virtual templates.
Opening: Friday, April 27, from 6 PM. The artist will be present.
Please register by April 24 at lochmann@alexanderochs-private.com.