Christel Dillbohner: After Nature

I have been interested in the layers and sedimentations of history for some time now. In my work, I plot the co-ordinates of events in space and time, thus making connections between the past and the present. I also study closely the traces that specific events leave behind - on the mind, soul, and body. The results of this research are the theme of my third solo exhibition at Gallery Hirawata

Nach der Natur - After Nature.

Its central piece is the painting "After Nature". In seventeen one-hour sessions, I engraved W.G. Sebald's prose poem "Nach der Natur" into wax layers on blackened mulberry paper (175 x 482 cm) and then glazed the wax with white oil paint, which makes the fine (filigree) markings visible.
Sebald's poem consists of three chapters:
  • A detailed description of the master piece by the 15th century German painter M. Grünewald, interspersed with his biographical details,
  • An account of the explorer G.W. Steller's travel with Vitus Bering's expedition to Kamchatka in the 1730s.
  • W.G. Sebald's own biography. He was born in 1944 and grew up in post-war Germany.

I feel very close to the poem, which is steeped in my own cultural heritage. It expresses the human desire to explore and to discover, to understand and to grow. It describes the close connection between art and nature and gives an understanding of melancholy and the human condition.
 
Christel Dillbohner
Berkeley, CA, 2005

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page written 19.06.2005, last edit 09:57 16.5.2020, Samstag