Faceless soldiers run through a landscape like white ants – in the large-format paintings, which were created from negative images of war scenes from the First World War, soldiers flee from a cloud of gas.the aesthetics of war today and then. Poison gas was praised early on as a ‘humane’ and ‘human weapon’, as the enemy is invisible or only blurred and it disperses enemy troops like ‘ants’. Despite various studies on the long-term health effects of gas, tear gas in particular is still used around the world, sometimes even by its own government against its own people. In our work we deal with the supposed beauty and glorification of war, which in today’s world is also echoed in the blind enthusiasm for technology and progressive automation (you can’t see the enemy, it has been proven that American bomber pilots during the Iraq war listened to music in their cockpits while dropping bombs – such a separation of ‘cause and effect’ makes destruction possible without reflection) of war.

Lueurs was the winner of the Mehdorn Foundation’s Franco-German Friendship Prize and was exhibited at Anscharpark Atelierhaus in June 2020. The images of contemporary protest movements and the use of tear gas were exhibited at Galerie Rainer Gröschl/Edition Berlin.