Dec 7, 2024 – Feb 23, 2025
Albert Dietrich
Heuballen, 2024
-
Heuballen, 2024
Oil on canvas
60 × 45 cm
Unique, signed
2.600 €
In his sculptural and pictorial works, Albert Dietrich takes an intuitive approach. He often creates installations that incorporate salvaged pieces of furniture, which act as supporting characters and lend a certain atmosphere to the works. The combination of different media, material relations, and the interplay of new and patinated textures result in diorama-like tableaux that seem lost in time, leaving room for our own thoughts. Heuballen (Hay bales) (2024) transports the viewer into a kind of trance with its rapid, circular strokes that appear to tap directly into childhood fascinations. The painting evokes memories of dusty, dry August heat, defied only by the delicately arranged forms standing like sculptures in the landscape, withdrawn into themselves, more an allusion than actually there. The sun-kissed color palette may speak to us of the pastoral scenes of Realism, albeit entirely void of any presence of hard-boiled farmers as the merchants of the four seasons. Lacking any hint of attribution, Heuballen instead relies on what may be our sixth sense, nostalgia, with its mildly sedative power to provide a brief moment of distraction from the gray indifference of everyday routines. The oil paint, which extends almost to the edge of the canvas, protects the image from its surroundings – or holds in check the seductive quality of frozen time.