From the blackness of a tomb, a pink, winged skull looms up, clumsily painted the color of raspberry chewing gum. The skull is perched on a pale female body that is pierced by a lance. In this painting, Leichenwagen (Hearse, 1987), Jürgen Kramer uses Bavarian votive pictures of purgatory as inspiration. But his palette is widely variegated. Kramer does not believe in a metaphysics of the image, or in esthetic appeal, or in the picture as a formed or shaped entity. His paintings help us to wander through the world of images. A constant subject throughout this wandering is death—not as the antithesis