CLINT ENNS - As the World Burns # I

Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 40 × 40 cm with 1 cm white border around the motif.
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 5 + 1 AP
Signed, dated and with an edition number by the artist on a separate label.

Clint Enns – As the World Burns I & II

The series As the World Burns depicts the apocalypse as an everyday spectacle. In #1, people sit lethargically in front of a burning room, unable or unwilling to react to the obvious. In #II, a lone man attempts to extinguish an inferno with a garden hose while the smoke turns into iridescent rainbow colors.

Both works reflect the paradoxical relationship of our present to catastrophe: We experience the destruction in real time – and react with apathy or helpless gestures. Enns' images are as serious as they are absurd, reflections of our own powerlessness and our strange need to search for beauty even in the sea of ​​flames.

As the World Burns # I

The world is ablaze, and people sit silently in their chairs, as if they were spectators of a theater that has long since become too real. A room in ruins, the windows ablaze, the smoke forming grotesque figures in the sky—and yet no panic, only lethargic impassivity.

Clint Enns' As the World Burns #1 feels like a parable for our present: climate crisis, political instability, the constant feeling of doom – and, at the same time, the routine of everyday life that paralyzes us. The fire is apocalyptic, but the characters' attitudes remain strangely calm, almost apathetic.

The work poses the uncomfortable question: Have we become so accustomed to the state of emergency that we view it as a spectacle? Between catastrophe and indifference, Enns presents a picture that seems painfully familiar—and, precisely for that reason, disturbing in its coldness.