Link only available on sub pages

A wayside shrine in the foreground and figures vanishing into a misty background – a scene with a mysterious, sombre quality. You almost seem to feel the damp, chilly air and hear the murmur of the monks as they chant their prayers. In a few moments, the procession will be swallowed by the mist – and already the cross carried at the head of the column is hardly discernible. But this is not a scene without hope. The first rays of sun cut through the misty greyness, hints of shimmering blue sky appear, and the crowns of tall trees emerge – all signalling the promise of new day.

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme was just 31 years old when he successfully captured this atmospheric depiction of a misty morning – a subject much loved by the Dresden Romantic painters. Here, Oehme directly references Caspar David Friedrich, his great artistic inspiration, who viewed landscape painting as a vehicle to express emotions. In Friedrich’s Abbey in the Oak Wood, for instance, there is also a group of monks in a landscape set against a dark bank of fog. Yet by taking the misty blur as the subject of his work, Oehme gives the topic a very new interpretation all his own. For Romantic artists, this blurring also had a religious significance, alluding to the ultimate divine presence of God behind the world of appearances.

But in terms of painting, a blurred image is a challenge, sketching in something, alluding to it and, in this way, bringing it alive. For curator Holger Birkholz, this offers a very interesting comparison with one of the contemporary artists on show in the Albertinum – none other than Gerhard Richter.

“In Richter’s case, the blurring always runs across the entire image. To produce that effect, he drags a squeegee or a dry brush over the wet surface. The Dresden Romantic painters always combined areas. The foreground was often composed as a drawing with the contours of objects still visible, creating a sense of perspective. In this work, for instance, the bushes in the foreground are still well delineated, as are the birds, and they have a haptic quality. Oehme’s blurred painted elements then allow him to develop a sense of spatial depth…“