City of Glass Norbert Stefan

We could observe the young artist in his debut show in 2020 at the gallery referencing Max Ernst´s decalcomania.

His second show in 2021 was amalgamating his strong interest into digital and film influencing the contemporary gaze. There had been works on display which had a stunning complexity in merging the digital with the actual painting layers.

In his upcoming third solo show at the gallery we encounter an artist who has further expanded his painting practice by complementing his research into formal iconography by an encyclopedic interest in the crossborders between human feelings and technological advances. Now all the paintings are in oil on canvas.

Norbert Stefan is intrigued by stripes. Contrary to Color field painting during the 1940s and 1950s, he is not intending to free the form from its objective context. What almost happens is the contrary. We can better imagine that the artist is more a child of the techno era where synthesizing pure ingredients into something metaphysical is playing with the transgressing, overlapping and redundancy of patterns throughout the world.

It would not be of a surprise that the artist is aware of the text by John Graham written in 1937, a treatise on aesthetics. The text is a very good description of how you could depict Norbert Stefan´s consideration of what painting is about for him:

„ An authentic intellecto-emotional reaction“. Graham was a significant figure of the avant - garde circles in New York in the thirties. In „System and Dialectics of Art“, Graham wrote: „No technical perfection or elegance can produce a work of art. A work of art is neither the faithful nor distorted representation, it is the immediate unadorned record of an authentic intellecto-emotional REACTION of the artist set in space.“ For Graham, the creation of space was the essence of painting: „This authentic reaction recorded within the measurable space immediately and automatically in terms of brush pressure, saturation, velocity, caress or repulsion, anger or desire which changes and varies in unison with the flow of feeling at the moment, constitute a work of art.“ (Page 52, AMERICAN PAINTING, Barbara Rose, Skira, 1970)

The stand alone position of NORBERT STEFAN is that he is rooted in the Cluj (Romania) school of painters with Adrian Ghenie and Victor Man, but up to now a non figurative painter and expanding abstract painting.