Kurt Stimmeder

BIOGRAPHY

Kurt Stimmeder (b. 1972, Bad Leonfelden, Austria) is a contemporary painter and lithographer based in Linz.

Working in oil on canvas and original lithography, he develops a form of psychological, gesture-based figuration. His work focuses on the expressive potential of the human body: subtle gestures, tensions and fleeting physical states that reveal inner psychological conditions. Rather than depicting narrative, he constructs images that hover between presence and ambiguity, where meaning emerges through posture, gaze and corporeal nuance.

His lithographs are printed in Prague in signed, limited editions. His works are held in private and public collections in Europe, the United States and Asia.

In 2026 CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo in Venice awarded his work a Special Mention for the Quality of Research at CREA OPEN.

His work has been the subject of art-historical description at the Katholische Privat-Universität Linz (KU Linz), is held in the art collection of the Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich, and was filmed by the University of Art and Design Linz for Re:Frame.

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Since 2018, art historical references in my work have served to describe the contemporary zeitgeist.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 neoromantic 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 I started to give room to human softness.

A series made in early 2026 turned toward rage, toward the dead flesh I pulled to the center of the foreground, with no way to look away; the tattoos are the ornaments of the Baroque translated into now.

Out of that series came “L’Origine du langage”: a piece of flesh as pre-linguistic matter, as substance that exists before we grasp it in language. The title shifts Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde”: from the origin of life to the origin of language. Behind it stands Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei, the lamb in the moment before the cut, still whole, already consecrated.

In the end we’re speaking of aphorisms that describe one thing: a journey inward. “The Heroine’s Journey” plays with all the preceding elements. A figure steps into a landscape after Bruegel; only the momentary truth won’t show itself directly. The head is blurred, granting the viewer every possible authority of interpretation. Yet the near-formless may also remind us that figurative painting, of all things, isn’t about what can be seen, and therein lies its strength.

My work asks to be read as a contemporary symbolism. Following the words of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “Love is to give what one does not have,” it extends a hand to the viewer: to lay one’s own story into the work. It is ready to carry it.

Written by Kurt Stimmeder