Stefan Kürten: Darker With The Day

Myth and reality converge in the paintings of German artist Stefan Kürten. City parks, suburban backyards, corporate courtyards, and industrial park landscapes embody the search for a natural but contained utopia, with everything in its right place. These works masterfully simulate such artificially idyllic places while belying the dark, desperate futility behind them.

For several years Kürten’s work has been about creating sites that don’t exist at all, but that remind us of places we’ve seen or been to before. Sometimes incorporating bits and pieces of architecture from photographs — banal office buildings, familiar houses — he creates the “perfect” composition, an archetype that we recognize and accept as authentic. His most recent work combines several painting styles he’s explored in the past few years. Interweaving realistic, scientific, and symbolic approaches to landscape on a single canvas, Kürten examines how we perceive nature in its perfection.