Susann Dubs
Born in 1957.
Susann Dubs recurrently works with subjects drawn from waste and compost, staging both «Kompostlandschaften» and discarded objects—caps, matchboxes, broken buttons, pieces of plastic—which become the pictorial subjects of her compositions.
Her works most often take the form of small series of oil-painted wooden panels, hung in long rows or dense arrangements, and also include medium-format still lifes as well as numerous small-scale works.
Painted naturalistically and at a 1:1 scale, these small panels render the precise appearance of discarded or abandoned everyday objects and underscore the materiality of waste itself as a pictorial motif.
The pictorial material itself is also part of the project: the artist uses recycled oil paint, some of which is described as being approximately fifty years old.
Oscillating between attraction and repulsion, this approach seeks to create tension in the viewer’s responses, confronting learned reflexes of avoidance with an openness that makes it possible to discern «beauty» in the ordinary or in what is considered ugly.
By showing «Kompostlandschaften» and foregrounding organic decay, the work establishes an ambiguous relationship to the living and to detritus, one that is as much a matter of staging as of naturalistic observation.