Kurt Stimmeder

ARTIST STATEMENT

Origins & Motivation

Drawing was part of everyday life at home. My father, a carpenter, and my mother, a tailoress, were constantly sketching plans and patterns. Yet their drawings always felt abstract or unfinished to me. Maybe that’s where my desire for form comes from – not just as surface, but as something that holds a deeper presence. I look for what lies beneath appearance: something you might call a soul or a psychological presence.

Themes & Conceptual Spaces

The way I perceive reality doesn’t fit fully into conventional explanations. That’s why I expand my thinking through mythology, philosophy, and systemic psychology. I’m especially drawn to tensions – those that exist between people, within groups, or inside ourselves. These tensions become building blocks in the composition of my images.

Visual Language & Style

I work in a contemporary realism that references the past without getting stuck in it. Much of what I paint feels like memory – something slightly displaced, yet still present. My figures and elements are often allegorical; they open up interpretive spaces rather than providing clear messages.

Technique & Materials

Oil painting is my central medium – it allows for the depth and physicality that suits my way of sensing things. I also work with lithography. The process of printmaking shifts the way I see and lets me approach my subjects from a new perspective.

Process & Approach

My approach combines intuition and concept. Often one painting leads to the next, like links in a chain. Themes continue, transform, or resurface unexpectedly. Sometimes an image appears in my mind out of nowhere and won’t leave until it’s painted.

Contemporary Resonance & Positioning

My work reflects the present, though often indirectly. I try to view current questions through the lens of the past, placing them within broader contexts. My paintings rarely offer straightforward readings – they aim to suggest, condense, and leave space.

Reception

What interests me most are the thoughts or feelings viewers bring to the work that shift my own perspective. I don’t expect my paintings to be understood in a specific way. But I welcome moments of resonance – or even interpretations I hadn’t considered. They deepen my relationship with the work.

Access to Painting

My path to painting was unexpected. It was actually a fortune teller who first suggested I express myself visually. My fascination with the mysterious and unseen suddenly found a home. Before that, I played double bass – music gave me an emotional outlet, but over time, I found sound too fleeting, too formless. Painting, on the other hand, allows me to give a lasting shape to the intangible – to make the unspeakable visible, and to find a kind of stillness in that.

Written by Kurt Stimmeder