Radrennen Possibly 1923

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made this watercolour painting of a bike race, presumably, sometime in the 1920s. It’s a mad dash of colour, right? I can imagine Kirchner splashing the paint across the paper, trying to capture the blur of motion and excitement. The colours feel vibrant, like he's trying to catch the fleeting energy of the race. See those looping lines of red and yellow ribbons in the breeze? The Swiss flags standing to attention? The way he’s daubed the colours, so freely and expressively, reminds me of other German Expressionists. Kirchner was always wrestling with how to represent modern life, how to convey feeling through form and colour. It’s like he’s saying that painting isn’t just about depicting what you see, but about how you feel when you see it. And that’s a feeling that connects artists, across time and space. It’s like a big, messy conversation between us all.