Nolan Judin are very pleased to open their new space with an exhibition of paintings by British artist Dexter Dalwood – his first comprehensive exhibition in Germany to date. As the title Dichter und Drogen (Poets and Drugs) suggests, the ten large-format paintings explore the intimate relationship between drugs and creativity and bring to the viewer’s mind the vital role that drug use and intoxication have played in the lives of many of the figures Dalwood alludes to. By the same token, poetry has been a vital element in Dalwood’s life and paintings referring to poets and writers have lined his oeuvre from the beginning. In this new series, some works take their titles from poets’ names – other titles evoke situations.

Heinrich von Kleist refers to the double suicide of the German poet and his friend, Henriette Vogel, exactly 200 years ago. Dalwood recalls a landscape Caspar David Friedrich painted shortly after Kleist’s death and the picnic from Monet’s version of “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe”. Despite the preciseness of these citations, everything remains at the level of suggestion and discloses little information about time or place.

In Robert Louis Stevenson we look at a mirror, draped in dark tartan, that no longer reflects. In the Scottish author’s best know story, respectable Dr. Jekyll famously transforms into the hideous monster Mr. Hyde by taking a drug, a white powder Jekyll has developed. Several of his biographers have theorized that Stevenson’s consumption of cocaine was the basis of this fiction, pointing to the fact that Stevenson wrote the story so quickly, despite his physical debility, and reported being exhilarated instead of exhausted by the experience.

Auden is more difficult to decipher. It takes it’s title from the English poet Wystan Hugh Auden, who described the painting “Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his famous poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”. But in Dalwood’s painting, the reflection of a building and a group of trees in an irregularly shaped pond also hint at Poussin’s “Orpheus and Eurydice”. For more than twenty years, W.H. Auden took Benzedrine every morning, depending on its euphoric stimulant effect, to start the process of writing.