Detlev Foth’s paintings are built in oil on canvas, and tend toward large formats that amplify the corporeal scale of his subjects. Colour and spatial compression are recurring strategies in his erotic pictures. Many works deploy a restricted palette – yellow and blue recurring as a tonal pairing – which isolates the body against ambiguous, often flattened interiors. That chromatic restraint, combined with layered brushwork, produces images of flesh which reads as sensuous yet cautious, immediate yet mediated. 

Foth’s handling of form moves between suggestion and clarity. Faces and limbs are sometimes rendered with candid solidity, elsewhere they dissolve into expressive strokes or surface interventions, so the erotic charge is always expressed in a painterly self-awareness.

While drawings and prints appear in Foth’s output, it is the oil paintings that most consistently anchor his reputation, situating Foth amid late twentieth century German painters working at the threshold of figuration and abstraction. These paintings articulate an eroticism that is formal as much as erotic, a choreography of colour, scale and surface that keeps the viewer oscillating between looking and being looked at.