• ArtistDirk Skreber
  • TitleUntitled
  • Year of Origin2020
  • GenrePainting
  • Technique and DimensionAluminum lacquer and sealing adhesive tape on canvas, 155 x 230 cm
  • Erwerbungsjahr
  • Acquisition of the Friends of the National Gallery / Donation of a member on the occasion of his 40th anniversary of membership

Dirk Skreber, Untitled, 155 x 230 cm, Aluminum lacquer and sealing adhesive tape on canvas, 2020. Exhibition view at Hamburger Bahnhof, 2021. Photo: Thomas Bruns.

In 2000, Dirk Skreber received the Nationalgalerie’s first-ever prize for young art. For his presentation in the Historische Halle in the Hamburger Bahnhof, the painter constructed a sequence of three square rooms that could be entered through locks and in each of which hung one of his paintings. In addition to an abstract painting, Skreber showed a landscape with three houses as well as a work with two locomotives that seem to be racing toward each other on a cross of rails in the forest. Depictions of railroads are a leitmotif running through Skreber’s work. The artist began the series in 1986, when he was still studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

The work donated to the National Gallery dates from 2020 and features an abandoned working locomotive in an empty landscape. The acrid green background and rising streaks of paint give the motif an eerie effect: is the train in a post-apocalyptic environment? Is it at the bottom of a sea? As is so often the case, Dirk Skreber allows any interpretive approaches to come to nothing: It could be like this, but it could also be quite different.

– Sven Beckstette