U.T.

Dirk Skreber uses heroic scale, exaggerated perspective and non-traditional painting techniques to evoke a sense of eerie silence in the deliberately non-specific locations in his painting. He often adopts the aerial perspective of the surveillance camera to heighten the mystery of his compositions, whether car crashes, flooded villages or apparently innocuous houses. Borrowing the grand scale of both historical landscape painting and modern abstraction to evoke the sublime, Skreber challenges the painterly contradiction between abstraction and figuration, often suggesting a fictional narrative within the work, but confounding any illusion of real space and distance through his use of an unnatural perspective. His paintings are uncanny and unsettling, and imply an overwhelming sense of impending doom. The strange houses that appear in his work, as in Untitled here, are located in spaces that recall the surreal landscapes of Yves Tanguy. The drips of paint that stretch from this house to the top of the painting mark a gesture to abstraction that belies the faithful reproduction of the house itself. As in all of Skreber's work, here the tension between the physical fact of the painting itself and the imaginary scenes being depicted act as a reflection on the relativity of truth in life as in art.