ASPEN,COLORADO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents Dirk Skreber, through February 6, 2005. This exhibition will feature new paintings by German artist Dirk Skreber (b. 1961). Though active in the mediums of drawing and installations, Skreber is best known for paintings that explore the tensions between subject matter and material. Skreber uses heroic scale, exaggerated perspective, and nontraditional painting techniques to evoke a sense of eerie silence in locations whose identities are usually left unknown. He often adopts the aerial perspective of surveillance and sky cameras, which heighten the mystery of his subjects, whether car crashes, floods, or seemingly ordinary buildings. Using a grand scale to express the sublimity of historical landscape painting and modern abstraction, Skreber challenges the seeming contradictions between abstraction and figuration and between beauty and catastrophe. In certain works, such as those made with foam insulation, Skreber picks directly into his material to create evocative, pictorial reliefs whose resulting imagery becomes even further abstracted from their origins.

Though his work has been exhibited widely throughout Europe, this will be Skreber's first one-person museum show in the United States. In 2000, Skreber was awarded the inaugural Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst (the so-called "Young Artist Prize") by the Neue Nationgalerie in Berlin, the most prestigious honor for a young German artist. Following its AAM presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Organized by the Aspen Art Museum in collaboration with the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha. Curated by Dean Sobel, AAM Interim Director/Chief Curator. Sponsored by the AAM National Council with additional support from Terri and Phil Schrager.