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Lot Essay
'Dirk Skreber similarly fuels his painterly practice with collective experience, though his interest veers towards a more visceral terrain. With the saturation of twenty-four hours news channels and the endless stream of infotainment available on the internet, the spectacle of - disaster whether natural or man-made - has become one of the most banal forms of experience in contemporary life. Painting on a monumental scale and using aerial compositional techniques that mimic the POV of surveillance cameras, Skreber portrays gruesome car crashes, floods of biblical proportion and impending train wrecks with a cold-blooded fascination. Yet unlike Warhol, Skreber's preoccupation with death and disaster does not seem to be lifted from a mass media source. Instead, Skreber's lushly painted images of catastrophe seem to be distilled from our collective nightmares. These disembodied images are like phantom memories, not based on actual events but part of the universal experience of contemporary life.' (A. M. Gingeras, The Triumph of Painting, London 2005, unpaged).