Armin Dietrich

Painting is where material and memory converge.

I think of cities as palimpsests. Like vinyl records, they carry the marks of their own history: layer upon layer, intervention upon intervention. Weathered façades, overwritten walls and fragments detached from their original context become the starting point for my work. They reveal that memory is not only something we carry within us, but something embedded in the surfaces that surround us.

I construct each canvas as an urban surface. Over days and weeks, I build its own history through layers of oil paint, scratches, wounds and patina before the image begins to emerge. I spray with oil paint rather than aerosol and work above all with my hands. The physical act of painting is essential. I want the surface to retain the traces of its own making and to resist the frictionless perfection of digital images.

I usually begin with drawing, often with my eyes closed. Personal memories merge with chance, intuition and echoes of art history. My visual language is informed by Arshile Gorky and the CoBrA painters, particularly Karel Appel, but the dialogue is ultimately with the city itself — its rhythms, its scars and its constant transformation.

My process is deliberately open. Paintings often evolve over months. I leave room for the unexpected, allowing spontaneous gestures and apparent mistakes to become part of the work. Rather than correcting them, I work with them. I paint until the painting stops asking questions.

In an increasingly digital culture, I see painting as a physical archive — a place where memory is not stored as data but embedded in material. Every layer conceals another; every mark preserves the history of a decision.

The city gives me my palette: concrete grey, ochre, rust and urban patina. Even the brightest colours contain concrete grey. In the studio, leftover mixtures accumulate over time; forgotten colours return months later in new paintings, carrying their own history with them.

I am less interested in what cities lose than in the way they are continually rewritten — never completely erased. My paintings move between abstraction and forms that refuse to disappear entirely. They ask for time. They unfold slowly and reward sustained looking. Viewers may recognise fragments of their own memories, their own cities and the surfaces of everyday life.

I see my paintings as material witnesses to contemporary urban experience — records of a city that is constantly changing while carrying the traces of everything that came before.