Art Brokerage: Dirk Skreber, (1961- ) b. Lübeck, Germany contemporary artist who lives and works in New York. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Dirk Skreber is one of the leading contemporary German artists. For Skreber, natural disasters, car crashes and near-miss train accidents become monumental icons of beauty. His epic paintings lovingly embrace catastrophe, offering a religious awe of their grim expectation. Depicted with high-gloss allusion to media imagery and viewed through the odd angles of a surveillance camera, Dirk Skreber's paintings are sublime mediations of death and isolation, rendered more intimate and appealing through the astringent sheen of consumerism. German artist Dirk Skreber works in sculpture, installation and painting. Ranging from the abstract to the representational, his work is concerned with the architecture of the hyperreal: highly articulated constructions which reside in suspended space and time. His subject matter draws from the mundane flow of contemporary life: buildings, car crashes and natural disasters are treated with the most clinical formalism. His work offers the detached seduction of the sublime. Often working in epic scale, Dirk Skreber’s paintings monumentalise the banal. Figurative scenes of lone train carriages and road accidents aren’t tableaux of narrative spectacles, but abstract incidents of incomprehensible beauty and horror. Rendered perfect in their making, their surfaces are impenetrable, exacting and serene; they don’t offer spatial illusion, but vast fields of emptiness.