Bernd Lieven

The painter Bernd Lieven makes use of the – apparent – capability of photography to produce a reliable illustration of reality.
His current works, published for the first time in this catalogue, present a view into the ‘garden-spaces’ that we think we know and recognise through their bleakness and state of neglect. Lieven does not take any spectacular examples of great landscapes as his subject, there are no paradisiacal gardens with palms and fountains; instead we find everyday gardens left to slowly decay, ruined buildings and piles of rubbish everywhere.
These garden-spaces evoke a very particular charm: Bernd Lieven achieves this powerful atmosphere with an effective and economic use of artistic technique: he reworks the photographs of gardens, reproduced onto canvas, in a painterly process of intervention and monopolisation and changes them into completely subjective ‘artist gardens’.