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until 11.06. | #3459ARTatBerlin | REITER | Berlin prospect presents from 29. April 2022 the exhibition DA IST NUR ZUKUNFT by the artist Thomas Sommer.
Opening for Gallery Weekend Berlin next week. Thomas Sommer is showing large multi-part works created over the last three years.
Thomas Sommer paints sublime landscapes inspired by the impact of nature and its magnificence on the soul and body. His work specifically refers to the Romantic tradition of landscape painting and uses colour palettes and painterly gestures by greats of the art historical canon such as Caspar David Friedrich, Iwan Aiwazowski, Johann Heinrich Füssli or even William Turner. Painted two centuries after the models Sommer cites, however, his landscapes show traces of our present-day relationship to a natural environment irreversibly damaged by us humans. Sommer’s work aims to make tangible the problematic position of nature in our relationships to life as an object of ongoing public concern.
In his latest works, Thomas Sommer combines several paintings into a compositional whole in order to capture the complexity of the subject of his choice. On a metaphorical level, this reveals the fractured relationship to nature, while the bringing together of individual parts to form a whole painting is at the same time an appeal to get to the bottom of the lost proximity.
Thomas Sommer, courtesy of Reiter Galerie
Since the world we live in must seek and assert its continued existence in a severely compromised natural environment, Sommer translates this reality into psychic constitutions rather than meticulously painted clear concrete locations. Nature is still magnificently and overwhelmingly depicted in them, but a hidden lurking underlying sense of dread runs through all these new works. The figures, too, linger recognisably in unease amid settings with dark and threatening skies.
Without doubt, the landscape forms the centre of Sommer’s painting, but as a framed and thus at the same time distanced theme. Motifs of domesticity, whether draped forms or architectural elements, frame the events depicted. Thomas Sommer’s paintings are ultimately understood as an in-depth psychological reflection of a misery of our time that is catching up with us in the form of the impending ecological tragedy.
Opening: Friday, 29. April 2022, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 29. April – Saturday, 11. June 2022
Special opening for the Gallery Weekend: Saturday, 30. April 2022 noon – 7:00 pm, Sunday, 1. May 2022 noon – 5:00 pm
To the Gallery
Exhibition Thomas Sommer – Reiter | Berlin prospect | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
