Dirk Skreber, “days before”

This German-born artist who grew up in the former GDR often takes a grim view of the human condition, most notably in his brooding, photo-sourced paintings depicting catastrophes of varying scale, from car wrecks to the subject his latest show: The Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine, which transformed the nearby city of Pripyat into a abandoned post-apocalyptic wasteland. The surreal landscapes here incorporate scenes of an amusement park that was set to open days before the disaster that forced the evacuation of the town, which remains an irradiated no-go zone to this day.