9 May 25 — 28 Sep 25
Sven Drühl, SDJM III, 2024, courtesy KÖNIG BERLIN © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025. Photo: Lepkowski Studios Berlin
Sven Drühl, Interview with Larissa Kikol, Kunstforum international, Volume 271, 2020
In its anniversary year, the Museum Wiesbaden is showing works by the Berlin artist Sven Drühl (* 1968 Nassau/Lahn; lives and works in Berlin), who has been working in the context of conceptual landscape art for over twenty years.
The exhibition “Fascination 19th Century, Artist — Collector — Theorist” shows around 35 works by Sven Drühl, some of them very large-format, mainly from the years 2018 to 2025 from three different series.
Sven Drühl studied art and mathematics in the 1990s at the height of the postmodern debate in the art context. This is precisely where his artistic basis lies, although the development does not end with postmodernism; since the 2000s at the latest, we have been talking about metamodernism, or post-postmodernism, so to speak. Drühl sees recourse to the artistic achievements of modernism and postmodernism as an opportunity to develop a new style, a new metamodern visual language.
The themes that the artist repeatedly explores in his works include cultural and media transfer, originality, authorship, quotation, remix, seriality, but also interference with nature and changes to the concept of landscape.
With the works from the silicone series, Drühl has been referring to works of art by other artists for over 20 years. They are pictures about pictures, second-order abstractions. Using a special technique of oil paint and silicone lineatures, the artist paints landscape motifs that all have a different meaning.
Sven Drühl, interview with Larissa Kikol, Kunstforum international, Volume 271, 2020
The paintings are complemented by bronze sculptures of mountain massifs. The source material for the sculptures in the Eroded series are detailed plaster casts of the Matterhorn and mountain formations from the Himalayan region. Drühl uses hammers, chisels and milling machines to alter these plaster casts, as if they were showing a glimpse into the future: the peaks of the mountain bronzes are eroded, eroded, partially destroyed. Drühl sees the bronzes as an extension of painting into space.
What all of Drühl's series have in common is that the narrative element is omitted. The landscapes appear undercooled, people are never visible in the paintings and thus come back into view through the back door, so to speak. Drühl works explicitly in series, with individual motifs recurring over the years, sometimes in different sections, in different colors or in different media, even in neon works.
The exhibition in Wiesbaden also honors Drühl's theoretical work. The artist not only holds a doctorate in art history, but has also made a name for himself as guest editor of a total of 13 volumes of “Kunstforum International” and author of numerous articles on art history.At the Museum Wiesbaden, Drühl is now also being presented as a collector for the first time. Drühl's works are complemented by a selection of around 35 paintings from his rich 19th century collection, which has been put together with a special eye: from Eugen Bracht to Janus La Cour and Carl Spitzweg.This juxtaposed presentation of works from 1855 to 2025 builds a bridge from the 19th century to the present day in the anniversary year of the Museum Wiesbaden.
