Volker Blumkowski's pictures could be described as "spectacularly unspectacular". He takes as his starting point what he encounters directly. His pictorial creations, which often show banal, peripheral everyday events but consistently contain an absurdist attitude, are based on memories, photographs and drawings that he collects mainly on walks. The artist freezes a particular action in his paintings, and with his photorealistic compositions offers constructive constellations and stage or action spaces that motivate to fill them with own thoughts, actors and stories.
For more than a decade, the focus of his attention has been a working world dominated by street workers, painters and craftsmen, in which the triumphant advance of the computer age has apparently not yet taken hold. In their peculiar, powerful presence, his protagonists are reminiscent of actors who are merely pretending to work.
"Generationally, Blumkowski is a nestling of the Junge Wilden. He had to act differently to assert himself against the older horde of brothers. So he relied on the quiet surrealism of an enchanted everyday life against the noisy neo-expressionism of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. His process consists of handmade pop with a Belgian twist." (Beat Wyss) At the same time, all comparisons with older or contemporary art lead nowhere - the artist's pictorial language is completely autonomous, far removed from a dream-related surrealism or from the mythical-narrative pictorial inventions of the so-called Younger Leipzig School, which Blumkowski precedes in time.