Ever since he started his career as an artist, Jürgen Köhler (b. 1954) has focused entirely on drawing. His figurative, situational, and abstract visual creations often hark back to key motifs from art history and its overarching iconographic themes, revealing the artist’s perspective on our time and the world we inhabit.

Saturated with mythology, religiosity, eroticism, and sexuality, his pictures feature symbols, figures, icy nature, and technicalized geometries; they conjure hidden and long-lost memories and thoughts in our minds; they open up erratic spaces that are rife with metaphors and allegories. His motifs spring from an imagination teeming with images that would remain obscure if we did not seek them out in the subliminal margins, below our everyday threshold of perception. They are steeped in the present, yet remain beyond its reach, like dreams.

Köhler’s drawings exude a kind of magic that springs from exactly this evocation of lucid dreams in which time and space have come to a complete standstill. Introducing works spanning a period of twenty-five years, this book provides an in-depth glimpse of Köhler’s fascinating oeuvre of drawings.