Essen

Set in the artist's hometown of Essen, this winter landscape shows families dressed in colorful clothes skating and sledding on a frozen pond. They are observed through a screen of bare tree branches that visually knits them together in an organic web. The effect is poignant, as though the viewer has chanced upon a delightful scene while walking through the woods. In this image Joachim Brohm explores the intimacies of social experience as they take place in the natural landscape, in a way reminiscent of the scenes of daily life by the 17th-century Netherlandish painter Pieter Brueghel. Brohm's decision to utilize color and to include people in his landscapes sets his work apart from the sober and monochromatic appearance of photographs by his German contemporaries.