Of all the exhibitions, this group show seems to me to be the most interesting, exciting and artistically fruitful so far. Not least because in all the works of art exhibited here the reference to time is unmistakable, the direct relationship to the excesses of violence, the wars and self-inflicted catastrophes that humanity is currently suffering. All four artists are suffering in their own way and give eloquent expression to their own experiences of suffering and co-suffering with the means of painting. Four important artists, Abdulhamid Abdalla from Syria, Edward Lightner from the USA, Reinhard Stammer and Michael Imhof from Germany, artists who could not be more different, are united in Pashmin Art Gallery with their works to bear witness to their, and all of us, longing for a better world. Images of nuclear explosions are a recurring motif of the artist born and raised in California – Edward Lightner. In the 1980s he was very influenced by nuclear tests carried out in the atmosphere, especially by their optics. During the 1990s and early 2000s, his focus shifted, concentrating more on the AIDs crisis. Later, he turned back to nuclear explosions in his painting. Edward Lightner’s paintings are moved by the sheer power and dark aesthetic of exploding nuclear bombs. Hundreds of underground explosions transformed the Nevada Desert and other areas. He developed a process to abstract each blast crater and render it in the form of a mandala (the titles of the images link to the individual tests), which allows him to focus on creating objects that are at once beautiful to look at and yet yield dark connotations from the origins of each image.