Apokryphe Landschaften / Apocryphal Landscapes

For around two decades the works of Sven Drühl have always referred to works of art by other artists. They are pictures about pictures—abstractions of a second order. Drühl uses a special technique involving oils, lacquer, and silicon to produce mainly landscape or architectural motifs that represent a kind of repositioning, in the sense of a remix.

In the past eight years his work method has inverted itself. In his lacquer paintings  Drühl turns the gaze around, no longer referring to works by Ferdinand Hodler or Caspar David Friedrich. Now, he starts with photographs by his fellow artists, such as Sebastiao Salgado, and even more recently, with virtual sources from the contexts of virtual reality and gaming. These vectors are translated into realistic-looking paintings, but the landscapes thus created no longer have anything to do with real landscape.