Looking at Till Gerhard, a trim, level-headed, thirty-something German artist, one would never guess at the cultural chaos roiling beneath the surface. But Gerhard’s work, the standing of which within a new style of pseduo-realism has been climbing at an astonishing rate, is a fountainhead of dystopic invective and sublime discontent.

Although he hails from Hamburg, Gerhard is often perceived as a member of the New Leipzig School, or a group of young East German artists who were coming up as the Berlin Wall was coming down. Their figurative paintings lie somewhere between Soviet Realism and Pop Art, and are generally pessimistic in their surreal takes on modern life. The mistake is easy to make—Gerhard’s large, lush oils hold meticulous figures within epic landscapes, but they are drenched in sickly sweet, ethereal light; interrupted by daubs and blotches of otherworldly energies; or occupied outright by ghosts and zombies. 

Gerhard laces the idealism of 1960s New Age-y transcendentalism with some bad LCD, and free love turns to libidinous depravity, campfire to cultish ritual, and geodesic dome to Death Star. Gerhard’s pop references (as diverse as The Beatles, Zabriskie Point, and Stonehenge) implicate contemporary history in his generalized view of culture and community—damning utopic social practices, or ideological surety, to a hallucinogenic limbo. “I feel like a distant viewer that sees a structure beyond the events of daily politics,” says Gerhard. “And the structure of power hasn’t changed over the centuries.” In his paintings, phantasms rise from dead republics to haunt the present, and the edges of the world peel back to reveal the ghosts of ancient ideologies.