Bart Domburg: Das große Fenster (The big window)

‘Through his work Bart Domburg rues the inadequacy of the present for an understanding of everyday life. His discourse isn’t really linked to a Nietzschean vision of the recovery of the value of history, or a Kiefer-like comparison between reality and myth. Domburg is aware of the fact that painting continues to be a window on the world and that art still functions today as an intermediary between known and unknown, material and immaterial. Bart Domburg wants to act with discretion; he knows painting shouldn’t shout. By selecting apparently innocent subjects, he develops a personal ecology of the image, depriving it of iconographic or ideological elements connected with current events, because he believes that history (like painting) is so strong that it can do without such support. Rather than manifesting dissent, the artist wants to bear witness to the awareness of being and of being there.’

G. Romano, ‘The big window’, in Bart Domburg: Das große Fenster, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2001, p. 38