MAR DE NIEBLA || Christa Zaat

Caspar David Friedrich (German painter) 1774 - 1840
Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog), 1818
oil on canvas
94.8 x 74.8 cm. 
Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany

Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

Christa Zaat