Christoph Schmidberger's technically adept and precise, luminous oil and acrylic paintings are deeply rooted in Western traditions of painting. There is no flower, piece of fabric or pose of a figure that Schmidberger hasn't considered with an art-historical eye. Schmidberger's highly charged, many-layered, and psychologically complex paintings share an affinity with Renaissance and Mannerist work, as well as with the portraits of John Singleton Copley and John Singer Sargent. The paintings suggest an enigmatic narrative and allegory about youth, beauty, innocence, paradise, death and loss. The human subjects are usually young and always narcissistic; the settings suggest a world that is at once dangerous and beautiful. Schmidberger's subjects both attract and repel; the viewer is caught between the beauty of the work and repelled because the subjects are so detached and self-consumed, offering the viewer a disturbing reflection of our own world.

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