Fukushima Painting

The title of the painting reveals its political reference: it was painted in 2011 as a reaction to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, which cost thousands of lives and caused mass homelessness, health and environmental damage. Between a blood-red cloud against a dark sky and explosively bright light, a bright red circle dominates the upper centre of the picture: nuclear centre, darkened sun and mutilated country motif at the same time. The narrow white edge of the circle floats above the chaos of the disaster like the remnant of a tattered and soiled Japanese flag. Hatchings in shades of red and blue diverge in all directions, tearing and overlapping, merging with freely furious brush gestures. A network of red dots looks like a burial ground above the skulls at the edge of the picture. Human existence becomes a textile metaphor here - everything is networked and interwoven, including life and death. In Fukushima, Felger captures the factual as well as emotional core of the life-destroying catastrophe in his visual language, both critically and empathically, without depicting it directly. The large format reinforces the impressive effect of the canvas, in which formal aspects from different phases of the artist's work are condensed into an explosive unity: Gestural and figurative, geometric and hatched structures meet explosively. Text from Dr. Christina Thomson