Fascination 19th century
The exhibition "Fascination 19th Century, Sven Drühl: Artist - Collector - Theorist" will show around 35 works by the artist from May 9 to September 28, 2025. The works will be complemented by a selection of 35 paintings by iconic 19th century landscape painters.
Sven Drühl, born in 1968 in Nassau/Lahn, studied art and mathematics in the 1990s during the height of the postmodern debate in the art context. His artistic basis lies precisely there, although the development does not end with postmodernism; since the 2000s at the latest, people have been talking about metamodernism. Drühl sees recourse to the artistic achievements of modernism and postmodernism as an opportunity to develop a new metamodern visual language: "I believe that innovation usually arises when you rethink tradition or the existing and try to combine the individual parts in a new way or simply give everything a good shake in a DIY manner. One step back and two steps forward." (Sven Drühl in an interview with Larissa Kikol, 2020)
Subject areas
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 referencing artworks 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 place all models, whether from Romanticism or from the context of contemporary art, in Drühl's recognizable style.
With his artistic approach, the artist pursues a re-evaluation and re-positioning in the sense of a remix. The second focus of the exhibition is on the works in the Lack series, which represents something of an inversion of the conceptual approach of the Remix paintings.
With the lacquer paintings, Drühl reverses the view. He no longer refers to art-historical models, which in turn are based on a view of nature. Instead, the artist now uses virtual models, which he extracts from the textured backgrounds of calculated worlds, such as those used in the gaming industry. The result is landscape paintings that usually no longer refer to a real landscape, but consist of set pieces generated by mouse click. 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.
Theoretical work & collections
Fascination 19th Century also pays tribute to Sven 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 being presented as a collector for the first time. Drühl's works are complemented by a selection of around 35 landscape 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. In this juxtaposed presentation of 19th century landscape painting with the works of the contemporary artist, the Museum Wiesbaden is drawing a bow back to the era of its foundation in its 200th anniversary year.
An exhibition in collaboration with the Hans Erni Museum, Lucerne.