Wild Animals, n. d.

The work shows foxes, camels, rhinoceroses, flamingos and other creatures running in all directions. They seem to be aiming for a large white circle on the left. It appears as though the animals were hastily fleeing something, falling over each other to get away. After World War I, which he spent as a war painter at the front, the artist Oskar Laske (1874–1951) intensively addressed the theme of Noah’s Ark, which he depicted on canvas in a frieze-like format of four meters. In the context of the time and theme, the animals’ escape from the Flood can be seen as an allegory of an imminent apocalypse following the devastation and destruction of war, and of the possibility of saving oneself from it.

AK, 2021