Stefan Kürten: Once In A Lifetime

Stefan Kurten’s subject matter comes from his own photographs of the places he grew up or has traveled to: the familiar, prosaic settings of public gardens and sculptures, shopping malls, and suburban architecture. His use of gold, silver, and copper under-painting creates a warm glow that enhances the nostalgic mood of the work, as though the scene were tarnished with age. It also lends a majestic or religious sensibility to otherwise mundane scenes. The compositions remove any sense of time or place, engendering a feeling of familiarity, of recognition, through the unavoidable association with one’s own memories.

Memory and its loss are pervasive themes. In Kurten’s paintings, sculptures and memorials seem to fade into the surrounding vegetation. “I believe I’m beginning to disappear,” says Fiona in the movie Away From Her, in reference to her growing awareness of the onset of Alzheimer’s. The timelessness of the settings – their lack of specificity – indicates a blurring of past and present. Who are we without memory? As memory fades, so does identity.

Some paintings intermingle wallpaper patterns of interior spaces with the exterior world. This merging of inside/outside, nature/artifice parallels the unreliability and decay of memory – the disappearance of self, the confusion between real/present and memory/past – where ultimately such distinctions no longer matter – or even exist.

Stefan Kurten lives in Dusseldorf, Germany. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Kunstlerverein Malkasten, Dusseldorf; Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; and Museum im Kulturspeicher, Wurzburg, Germany. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Saatchi Gallery, London; and many others.