(15) Amsdorf

The painting is taken out of a series of paintings, created in 2026 in the central German mining region, which explores the concept of time in diverse and overlapping ways. The paintings were created using pigments produced by the artist herself directly from the landscape – lignite from the Amsdorf opencast mine, as well as goethite and haematite, which are typically extracted from soils in mining-affected areas of Lusatia. The use of raw materials from a landscape that took millions of years to form is a commentary on geological time. However, as the landscape was created through human intervention and layers were exposed that would otherwise have remained hidden underground, the paintings are also a commentary on the Anthropocene, which is characterised by human interventions in the natural environment that shape and alter it. Finally, the depiction of a landscape adds a third temporal dimension: the time the artist spends in and with the landscape to produce and abstract the observed elements and transform them into an artistic, painterly composition. For the viewer, these three processes unfold in reverse order: At first, they notice the semi-abstract forms of the artwork and may reflect on the nature of the artistic creative process; on closer inspection, they may realise that the landscape depicted has been altered by humans, and finally they notice the earth materials, shaped by geological time, from which it was created.