STEFAN WISSEL
PAINKILLER
23 MARCH
11 MAY 2024

We are delighted to present Stefan Wissel’s third solo exhibition at VAN HORN.
Stefan Wissel has many occasions to create new works: a song lyric he has picked up, a functional piece of furniture, a DIN-standardized building element, a film sequence, a company sign discovered in scrap metal, as well as striking works of contemporary art. All of this challenges him to create artistic interventions and new and re-enactments of existing elements. What always characterizes Stefan Wissel’s way of working is his alert, curious and often astonished view of objects and phenomena that many people do not even notice. In his work, Stefan Wissel not only shows the physical characteristics of each object, but also the barely comprehensible emotional content that is evoked when two unexpected things suddenly collide.*

In his work, Stefan Wissel always reflects on questions of original and copy. He researches original authorship and commentary, he plays with theme and variation. He shifts the meaning of the object through simple gestures of lengthening or shortening, the manipulation of color, proportion, size and surface.

*based on a text by Magdalena Kröner

„I detach personally relevant, familiar objects or objects that are influential for me in terms of content from their specific origin, their intimacy, their formal contexts or functionality. This process alone is a transformation, because the things are no longer what they originally were. Their respective charge or attraction sets the impulse for the beginning of a unique artistic process. At this moment, I am particularly interested in the genuine energy that accompanies it, which at the beginning has no concrete format, no structure, but is fundamentally free precisely because of its formlessness, its immateriality, and could take on any state. It is only through the dynamic process of materialisation and the emergence of form that the specific identity of a work and thus also its conditions and its very own form slowly emerge………….are complex constellations (moodboards) that are brought into connection: A feeling is a physical state, a physical state is a colour, a colour is a surface, a surface is an object, an object is a narrative, a narrative is an image, an image is a discourse, a discourse is a memory, a memory is a feeling and so on…there is no hierarchical or categorical order between the elements used in development processes.“

Excerpt from a text by Stefan Wissel 2024

STEFAN WISSEL | GALLERY EXHIBITIONS