Bart Domburg's move from Amsterdam to Berlin in 1998 had a decisive influence on the themes of his paintings. Instead of portraying people he started painting portraits of places. Especially Berlin's history-charged places inspired him to many visits and photo-sketches and finally became the central subject of his figurative oil-paintings. Despite an almost veristic painting technique transparency is never intended. These places – Cecilia Court Palace, where the Potsdam Conference took place, or the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee – all have a hidden history. Bart Domburg's paintings mostly focus on parks and gardens, they show scarcely more than meadows, water, trees and branches. However the titles like Berlin, garden, house of the Wannseeconference, suggest that it's not only about some views of a park in autumn, with bare trees and sandstone-coloured buildings. Domburgs views of Berlin with their direful, dull skies are charged with historical, political, personal and symbolic meaning. To such an extend, that even in the outside the air seems heavy.

When Bart Domburg finally focuses on places, which are on the contrary somewhere, he consequently pursues his interests. In concentrated details, the view into an even more condensed forest is limited to the radius of a torch. Two reflecting windows, two empty beds, curtains. In these representations, also legible as inner pictures, everyone is already gone, hidden or has never been there. The viewer keeps on being barred – not only from the history, but also from the timelessness. The gaze is limited and restricted, brushes off and meets emptiness.

In Bart Domburg's most recent works, which Bourouina Gallery shows under the title “Capital“ from the 10th of January 2008, a linking of his previous leitmotifs becomes apparent. At the same time new aspects emerge. Since a few years Bart Domburg exclusively concentrates on facades and studies every aspect of this theme – similar to how he before fathomed the limits of his portraits of people and places by experimenting with close-ups and blow-ups. The facade as the interface between privacy and the outside world always stays recognisable as the subject, whereas it always borders on abstraction. Facades of apartment buildings with a row of windows are juxtaposed to colour screens, oscillating between reflecting fronts of office towers and pure colour fields. The multiply refracted light suggests something being opposite, without actually making it apparent. The dazzling lighting effects are very seductive. At the same time the limits of the paintings refuse to give any orientation for horizontals and verticals and let the rows of windows slide off the axis. Through edges and fissures, which only mistakably suggest plasticity, the viewer stays behind disoriented. While these places, bend and folded, become materialised.