Holger Kalberg 's oils and watercolours begin with an arbitrary photograph, often found on the Internet, which the artist re-interprets using paint, enabling him to record his personal experience of the image.

In photographs reality is uniformly heightened; using it as a starting point allows Kalberg to take a more studied approach to his subjective interpretation of the depicted space and emphasizes his own relationship to the sense of emptiness and loss in each environment, a blankness that the artist feels is a product of the source material.

The infusion of the impersonal, anonymous remove of the photograph with a human touch highlights the implicit familiarity of the isolated urban landscape within our collective memory and generates a renewed interest in places within the urban environment that are often relegated to the periphery both physically and mentally.  The artist is interested in non-spaces, in the effects of a consumer culture in an environment that is taking shape predominantly through the results of global market forces.

In these careful and deliberate paintings, Kalberg's brushstroke is exceptional in its sensitivity, revealing the hand of the artist in the thinly diluted water and precise delineation of concrete bricks, or soft density of brushwork forming trees, which suggest movement or stillness and infuse the image with subtle emotion.