Fuchs und Wolf im Brunnen 2019

Siegfried Zademack's "Fuchs und Wolf im Brunnen" is a painting that, whether recent or not, feels like a strange dream, a fable rendered with an almost surreal precision. I can imagine Zademack starting with the setting: the stark geometry of the well against a night sky, each element meticulously placed. The hyper-realism gives it a hallucinatory quality, like a Magritte, but with furrier protagonists. The wolf, caught mid-leap, the fox stuck at the bottom – it speaks to a kind of trap, a double bind. It could be a comment on the absurdity of cooperation. And then there's the way Zademack paints the water, how he uses light to create depth. I mean it’s so precise and strange and uncanny. Painting is always about problem solving; it's exciting when artists throw strange elements together to ask a viewer to solve it with them.