Kurt Stimmeder

Lives and works in Linz, Austria

Artist statement

I paint oil on canvas. I work in Linz. What interests me is the small thing that slips in from the unconscious: what the body reveals without our wanting or controlling it. The hand that holds too tight. The jaw that opens. A tension waiting for release, perhaps long overdue. Moments before it surfaces, in the middle of it, or just after. In any case, a point where some resistance gives way. My paintings come about with models, in a kind of systemic constellation of the sort used in psychotherapy. I set out a sketch and an idea, sometimes only a key moment, bring the participants together, and let them interact. Scenarios arise on their own. I watch and wait until a pose gives way and something comes through that can't be staged. Since 2018, art historical references in my work have served to describe the contemporary zeitgeist. A neo-romantic reading suggests itself: just as Romanticism idealized the Middle Ages to compensate for hyperrationalism and the frustration of old power structures forever reasserting themselves, my references point to the same compensatory mechanism, now at work in the collective unconscious. In "The Golden Blessing," two women in golden garments, almost as if at a party, meet Raphael's quiet, static Christ. The opposites don't merely sit side by side: the gesture of Christ's hand, the magic wand in the women's grip connect them, like a bridge between eras that opens a world of its own beyond time. For me the painting was a beginning, the moment...

Artwork