The starting point for German artist Werner Fohrer’s paintings is the visible reality of the natural world. Recently his landscapes show his immediate surroundings: forests in a hilly country with its typical trees and streams, shown in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

In contrast to landscapes painted two hundred years ago as part of traditional German Romanticism, Fohrer’s pictures are not combined sections of different scenery and don’t have any religious meanings as in, for example, in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840). Fohrer’s subject is a new interpretation of landscape, which could be named New German Romanticism. He examines the point at which nature disguises and obliterates the evidence of man’s use, or misuse, of the landscape. Man’s interventions are shown being overwhelmed by the unstoppable fecundity of the natural world.

Fohrer’s work suggests that there may be a point at which all evidence of man’s existence may be no longer discernible. This process re-defines ‘Romanticism’ in a modern way.