During the 18th century Pompeii and Herculaneum were excavated. Remnants of the classical civilisation as well as traces of enormous devastation emerged, something that stimulated the Romantics’ fateful imagination and interest in history. In the late 18th century, history began to be regarded as a linear development in periods of prosperity and decay. Just as Pompeii displayed traces of a bygone high culture, the Romantics discerned in the modern city the seed of the downfall. Gerhard Nordström portrays Pompeii and modern industrial ruins in the pictorial language of Neorealism in a powerful series of images that serves as a reminder that a similar havoc can befall us.
Kristoffer Arvidsson