Wildboden Mountains Forest 1928

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner made ‘Wildboden Mountains Forest’ using oil paint in the early part of the 20th Century. The colours and the mark-making in this painting feel spontaneous, alive, and raw. It’s like Kirchner is trying to get something down quickly, to capture the feeling of being in this place. There’s a luscious, almost cake-like, quality to the application of the oil paint and, even though the scene is a landscape, there’s something claustrophobic about it. The trees are dominant, imposing and the colour is keyed-up, everything feels slightly off-kilter. Look at the way he’s painted the pink path which leads to the buildings in the middle-ground: it’s not a naturalistic pink, it's jarring against the other colours. But, somehow, it works, adding to the emotional impact. Kirchner was part of the Expressionist group Die Brücke and you can see, in his use of colour and flattened perspective, a debt to artists such as Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde. These artists weren’t interested in depicting reality, they wanted to express something of their inner world. With Kirchner, I don’t think there is any one definitive meaning. Instead, it’s a painting that allows for many possible interpretations.