【Shanghai·The Bund】《Sven Drühl：Hyper Landscape》 ——Beyond the Sea of Fog 2026.5.30-7.26

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《Sven Drühl：Hyper Landscape》
——Beyond the Sea of Fog

Shanghai·The Bund
2026.5.30-7.26

Bluerider ART

Curatorial Statement

Bluerider ART Shanghai·The Bund is honored to announce the 2026 solo exhibition of our represented German artist Sven Drühl, "Hyper Landscape"—Beyond the Sea of Fog. For over two decades, Drühl has devoted his practice to the exploration of conceptual landscape art. This exhibition presents major works created between 2023 and 2026, encompassing three significant series: silicone paintings, lacquer paintings, and sculpture.

Sven Drühl (German, b.1968) holds a PhD in Art Science from Goethe University Frankfurt and currently lives and works in Berlin. During the 1990s, Drühl simultaneously pursued studies in art and mathematics, and the postmodern discourse of that era profoundly shaped his methodology—a conceptual foundation that continues to underpin his practice today. Drühl employs unconventional materials such as silicone, oil, and lacquer, drawing upon their distinct chemical properties to render natural motifs including mountains, trees, and volcanoes. He has been recognized as a key supported artist by Volkswagen Stiftung Hannover, Rohkunstbau Berlin and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation New York. Exhibited at museums including Museum Wiesbaden, Hans Erni Museum, Märkisches Museum and the National Museum of Art of Romania. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Berlinische Galerie -Museum für moderne Kunst, Berlin, Deutsche Bank, and the Allianz Group, among others.

The title "Hyper Landscape" is not a representation of nature, but rather a profound deconstruction of how nature is perceived. With the cool logic of a mathematician and the appropriative strategies of postmodernism, Sven Drühl extracts the Romantic symbols embedded in art history and recodes them through silicone, lacquer, and vector data—generating a state of "hyperreality suspended between actual terrain and digital virtuality. The subtitle Beyond the Sea of Fog directly references the iconic Romantic legacy of Caspar David Friedrich. When the mist that once symbolized divinity and introspection two centuries ago finally lifts, what remains is no longer the solitary wanderer, but a stark, austere map constructed from algorithms and industrial materials. Drühl guides us through the fog of sentiment toward a landscape devoid of human figures yet saturated with cultural residue—where landscape becomes a meditation on memory, artificiality, and a hyper-landscape belonging to the future.

Sven Drühl is a mathematician at heart, captivated by landscape painting throughout art history since the Renaissance. He has authored numerous studies on contemporary art, with particular interest in post-structuralist and postmodernist discourses of the 1990s—discussions surrounding authorship, originality, composition, hybridity, remix, and the crossing of media and genres. Landscape has always been his central motif. Appropriation serves as one of his core creative strategies. Using unconventional materials—silicone, oil, lacquer—whose distinct chemical properties he fully exploits, he depicts mountains, trees, and volcanoes with fluidity.

He moves effortlessly between European art history and Japanese ukiyo-e, contemplating the surfaces of landscape and the seductive qualities of light over extended periods of observation. Drühl’s work is concerned with how the idea of nature is constructed, disseminated, and reproduced. His landscapes are both meticulously composed and strangely familiar, reflecting how contemporary perceptions of nature are increasingly shaped by visual media, digital technology, and cultural memory. Against the backdrop of climate change and ecological fragility, these works open a reflective space—prompting us to reconsider the landscapes we experience, the landscapes we consume through media, and the landscapes that may vanish in the future. A distinctive feature of Drühl’s work is the complete absence of narrative elements. The absence of figures, paradoxically, points indirectly to human presence and impact. He often works in series, returning repeatedly to certain landscape motifs over long periods, shifting between different media, colors, and forms—even extending into light-based works. His methodology is built upon appropriation and reinterpretation: historical landscape paintings, digital renderings, and mathematical models all become source material, producing landscapes that resist any specific geographic location.

2026 solo exhibition, Drühl presents four series. The lacquer painting series is based on computer vector graphics, rendering hyperrealistic mountains, volcanoes, and seascapes —a complete departure from traditional plein-air painting. In "S.D.E.T", the sheen of lacquer and the chiaroscuro of oil brushstrokes together shape the dimensional contours of mountain peaks—sharp, lifelike, hauntingly familiar—blurring the line between virtual and actual terrain. The silicone series responds to the tradition of landscape painting throughout art history, translating classical imagery into bold silicone contours that point to the distance between the ideal of nature and its mediated representation. The large-scale new work "A.W.L" uses silicone to outline rocks and peaks in three dimensions, while pink oil brushstrokes inject a human warmth into its otherwise industrial, austere composition. In the monochrome black work "C.D.F. (Undead)", the surface is enveloped in heavy black oil paint—as the viewer’s gaze shifts, light reflects across the surface and the mountain layers transform accordingly. The "Mountain Relief" sculpture series is derived from processed geographic data of actual mountain terrain, yielding forms that evoke cinematic science-fiction landscapes while preserving their real geographic origins. The bronze sculpture "Eroded" begins with a plaster cast of an actual mountain, worked over with hammer, chisel, and milling machine—its fractured, eroded peaks becoming symbols of natural erosion and the passage of time. These sculptures extend Drühl’s paintings into spatial form. Drühl also selects several 19th-century landscape paintings from his personal collection to be presented alongside his own works, including pieces by Janus la Cour and Edward Theodore Compton. In the new work "J.L.C. II", Drühl appropriates a corner of Janus la Cour’s "Coastal View" from his own collection, layering silicone and oil to form vivid textures—tracing a contemporary landscape through cross-media hybridization. When works spanning from 1870 to 2026 are placed side by side in the gallery, they ignite a dialogue between historical landscape painting and contemporary artistic practice.

In the work of Sven Drühl, landscape is no longer merely a representation of nature, but a reflection on how nature is seen, understood, and transmitted. By interweaving the iconographic tradition of Romanticism with the language of digital imagery, he opens a space for contemplation—where questions of nature, memory, and artificiality may be posed anew.

《Sven Drühl：Hyper Landscape》——Beyond the Sea of Fog

Press Preview: May 29 (Fri) 2pm-5pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 30, 2026 2:30–6:00 PM (Opening Ceremony at 3:00 PM, open to public)
Exhibition Dates: May 30 – July 26, 2026
Bluerider ART Shanghai · The Bund
133 Sichuan Middle Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, China
Open: Tuesday-Sunday 9:30am-6:30pm 
info.china@blueriderart.com
T: 021-63306166