»Sun is God«: William Turner's Famous Landscapes at ARoS

Early on, William Turner's reputation as a child prodigy accompanied him, and he was educated at the Royal Academy of Arts as a history painter, by 1800 considered the highest genre of painting. But Turner quickly moved away from this path and devoted himself to landscape painting. Seeing himself as a successor to Titian and influenced by new theories such as Goethe's theory of color, Turner elevated color in his works to the most important means of reproducing forces and phenomena of nature.

Turner always painted in the studio, intuitively and only after rough orientation on the sketches he had made in nature. He experimented with idiosyncratic techniques such as using saliva, partially scraping off dried paint with his fingernail, or dipping finished paintings in water so that the colors flowed into each other even more. This brought him fame among collectors and ridicule among critics. Turner subordinated everything to the atmospheric rendering of nature, so he did not shy away from using black in watercolors, which was considered a »dead« color and therefore shunned by most watercolorists.

Turner's application of color led him to an almost abstract pictorial language. Among other things, these abstract-looking works by Turner influenced many modernist artists on their way to abstraction decades after his death. Since 1984, for example, he has been honored by the famous Turner Prize named after him. In the 17 oil paintings and 87 watercolors on display, the exhibition »Sun is God« explores Turner's oeuvre, seeking answers to the question of what exactly moved Turner in his works.