Bomb 2018

Eckart Hahn made this painting of a bomb and a bird, it is not dated and the materials are unknown. The hyper-realistic style and muted tones give the painting an air of stillness, but it is an uncanny quiet that belies the subject matter. The almost perfectly spherical bomb dominates the scene with its smooth, graphite surface, but then there is that tiny bird perched precariously on the detonator; the absurd juxtaposition makes you laugh but it also makes you anxious. If you look closely, you can see the artist has paid careful attention to the materiality of the rope, each individual strand is so realistically rendered that you can almost feel its coarse texture; and that pop of red inside the fuse, a warning, a prelude to possible annihilation. I think Hahn is in conversation with artists like Magritte, who also combined mundane objects in surreal ways to create works imbued with psychological tension; this painting is also full of such ambiguity. It’s a very dark joke, but the longer you look at it the less funny it becomes.