A telephone card based on Johannes Kahrs’ painting HIT, 1994, is being issued to commemorate his receipt of the International Schlumberger Award for Art. Ironically, this work is the realistic portrait of a woman who faces the viewer with closed eyes, her hands held against her ears as if to block out noise, she looks as if she is pressing her face against a pane of glass.

In most of his works, he uses photographs from newspapers as models from which he creates large easel paintings, which have a stylistic affinity to the work of Gerhard Richter. His backgrounds disappear into a field of cloudy