JT Spunk | Photography

About Dirk Skreber : I Want to be Artist

Dirk Skreber’s Untitled offers an eerie sense of stillness, his monumental locomotive frozen in a moment of detached anticipation. It’s not the actual subject that Skreber portrays but the haunting quality of it. He savours the illusion and contradiction of technique. Merging collaged elements of foil tape and foam rubber into the painterly surface, Dirk Skreber creates a tension between the abstract and representational. The dented steel of the train, the impenetrable gradient of the sky, and uncertainty of the dusty ground belie their artificial construction, each generating an austere, intangible quality. Sublime in their unreality, they culminate in an apprehensive tension where anything (or nothing) might happen.

Untitled portrays an ordinary image, the kind seen in a million postcards and magazines. Rendered on a monumental scale, Dirk Skreber reconstitutes the mundane as the object of an all-consuming fixation. Completely static, the painting is removed from all measurable qualities of perception. It represents a generic stand-in for overwhelming sensations of inadequacy and incomprehension.

Suspended in time and space, Untitled occupies an incalculable gulf between charisma and disaster, a reflection of the numbing state of contemporary consciousness.

Interrupted with harmonious composition of shapes, Dirk Skreber’s luminescent colour field is an exercise of pure aesthetics, a painting boasting formal perfection. In Untitled Skreber uses natural disaster as a means to negotiate the problems of painting: the sublime contemplation of modernism is transferred into a more frightening contemporary construct, where personal psychology is subsumed by the public realm. Incorporating tape to create a disjointed effect in the surface, he creates a textural stress undulating beneath the placidity of the scene.

Dirk Skreber reinvents trepidation as a normalised condition of collective consciousness: awe as a symptom of mass-media proliferation; spirituality as an achievement of design.

Aerial views of surveillance photography and replication of print media are antiseptic placebos of intimacy: unnatural modes of viewing that have become instantaneously familiar, an essentially indifferent way of experiencing the world. Dirk Skreber doesn’t strive for photorealism, yet his work borrows from the tropes of mechanical reproduction. Translated into painting, these devices are uncanny. Untitled, a spectacle of catastrophe, becomes a cerebral deliberation of poetic form through Dirk Skreber’s intervention.

It Rocks Us … radiates with the most stylish glamour: a pure liquid horror that is truly breathtaking to behold. The high-gloss sheen of media imagery is reinvented through painterly effect, the medium capitalising on its own qualities of oily seduction and alluding to nothing but its own materiality and surface.

Painted by Dirk Skreber in dispassionate grey tones, the subject matter is completely dehumanised. The double image, like Warhol’s prints, suggests an emotional absence. Icy in its clinical detachment, It Rocks Us… offers an empty spiritualism, transfixing the viewer with its awesome and ethereal presence.

What to Do Next…

If you want any information about Dirk Skreber or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/dirk_skreber2.htm

About the Author

Dirk Skreber,Artist Dirk Skreber, Dirk Skreber exhibitions, Dirk Skreber painting’s at Saatchi gallery, Dirk Skreber London contemporary artworks.

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