Markus Draper’s More than a story presents a selection of his images going back to the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state in the US on 18 May 1980. Draper began to develop a fascination with photos and videos of this natural disaster in 2007. In the same year, he focused for the first time on the volcano’s peculiar ash cloud formations – a motif that would become a recurrent subject that still informs his paintings today. It is important for the artist that his pictures cannot be 'located'.
My paintings do not seek to depict a concrete event – rather, they express a general feeling of insecurity, acting as a kind of diagnosis of society: there is a sense of unease, of vague fear and malaise that cannot be related to any specific causes. They also express a kind of criticism. It may be more comfortable for people to persevere in a state of fear than attempt to change the situation they are in.
44 pages, 24 x 32cm, softcover, Spector Books (Leipzig).