ACKERSTRASSE, 1985
Werner Brunner, Berlin
Berlin-based painter
Studio address: Oranienstrasse 19a, D-10999 Berlin, tel. +49 (0)30 615 33 60
My earlier work addressing the subjects of history,
the Berlin cityscape, the Berlin Wall,
Friedrich Nietzsche, the mythological Atlas
who was obliged to shoulder the weight of the world, and the Ark
as salvation-bringing shelter has been followed in recent years by pictures
dealing, often ironically, with the relationships obtaining among architecture,
urbanity, space, and countryside.
Our built-up environment has a major impact on our everyday existence.
Not only does it influence how we feel about life, it also affects our
social sensibility and behaviour as well as our culture of living. In
this respect, I am operating in the midst of a highly topical discourse
that I reflect with my own means and devices. Much of my raw material
is supplied by photographs I find in newspapers and architectural journals,
in other print media and advertisements, as well as by Romantic landscape
depictions by painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, whose meaning I
alter or freely develop with painterly means. I also portray architects
in the act of presenting their models, as well as ad-world consumer commodities
that, lined up in fantasy urban groupings, evoke the character of architecture.