DR (UNDEAD)

As the history of landscape painting shows, the images are not simple reproductions of an external world, but rather constructions of a personal world, internal or immanent to art. It is precisely through this process of construction that Sven Drühl delves with his landscape images, using it to devise his own pictorial worlds, and create independent aesthetic objects that don’t deny their origins and construction.

The starting points for his paintings are pre-existing works, from which he extrapolates components that he transposes to new paintings, completely transformed.

This way they become objects – new and autonomous images, often combined with details from other paintings. And so, it is not uncommon that, in Sven Drühl’s works, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich be used for its linearity, or that single lines be mixed and recomposed with elements from paintings by Ferdinand Hodler or by Eberhard Havekost, generating something completely new.

There are no stylistic or epochal preferences in the selection of these “original images”: the spectrum extends from landscapes dating back to the romantic period, to the images of symbolism, to paintings by his peers. If a common factor were to be pointed out, it would be found in a wider sense in an apparently west-European pictorial language.

Sven Drühl defines himself as a “child of the nineties”, molded by the music of the time e by the DJ culture, when referring to his paintings, to samples and remixes: the combination of originally different and opposing styles that creates a union of incredible compositional harmony.