Stefan Vogel – dieses Komma besteht aus einem losen Ende mit mindestens zwei
In dieses Komma besteht aus einem losen Ende mit mindestens zwei, the comma becomes not only a linguistic principle but also an architectural and material one. It connects at least two: two rooms, two panels, two media. Never one and never whole, it is always the promise of a connection, of a convergence that has not yet arrived.
Entering the space, one anticipates an encounter with the works on display. Yet before any work reveals itself, one comes up against a wall. Built from wooden battens and covered with fabrics that have each seen a previous use, stained, marked by water rings and unevenly stitched together, this wall does not so much block the room, as it defers ist fulfilment and the expectation bound up with it.
Beyond a narrower passage, a second, raised room opens up, in which ceiling and walls draw closer and the space contracts around the body. Muted light seeps through the fabric of the walls and is scattered into a warm, softly diffuse glow, while whatever lies behind appears only as contour, a blur. The walls create more than an atmosphere. They create a place that shelters something still in the process of becoming, something that needs tending. It is half open and half concealed, separating by connecting and connecting by separating. Read More
Irregular openings have been cut into the floor. They are rudimentary gaps that aspire to be nothing more. Things rise out of them, branch out and run through the floor. Some of the openings hold withered and dying potted plants from Vogel’s studio. Others are filled with ink and plaster, the liquid in each pot differing in darkness, in height and in amount. Within them lie hidden fragments, displacements and overgrowths. What rests inside does not appear finished. It reads instead as the remains of a process that has not yet run its course. The floor thus becomes a source of dwelling in its own right. It bears, opens, disrupts and guides. Where gaps appear, the path ends, and where they are absent, it continues. It becomes a map, a set of instructions that can only be read by walking. Between the two zones there is no progression but a shift: a change in posture, material and perception. The openings separate and connect at once. They act like rudimentary commas in space, interrupting the passage without closing it.
The material logic of the exhibition rests on pairings. In es fließt süß hinein und salzig hinaus, a hand-pulled photographic print on baryta paper meets a concrete panel. The two materials do not simply sit side by side. They form a pair of image and body, of light surface and heavy mass, of the fleeting touch of light and the physical weight of matter. The photograph preserves something that has already passed. The concrete, by contrast, carries the trace within its own substance. Where salt has been mixed into the concrete, crystals and craters emerge. The material thus produces a landscape of its own, one that partly escapes the artist’s control. The concrete becomes not merely the support for a surface but itself the site of possible transformation.
Paired alongside it stands Der Winkel duscht und hat natürlich wieder Angst dabei. This phrasing grants a corner the ability to shower and to feel fear, and in doing so it collapses the distance between built space and affective body. The corner is no longer merely an architectural form. It becomes a place where closeness, shelter and unease meet. The space acquires a feeling; the body, a spatial form.
The thread continues in zu Hause enden, where greyscale index-finger prints cover a photograph of Stefan Vogel’s studio corner, filling the picture plane row by row as an index of the body in its most irreducible form. The title zu Hause enden undermines the Heideggerian notion of dwelling as sheltered belonging. For Vogel, to dwell does not mean to arrive at a destination but to persist in what remains unfinished: an inhabiting of debris rather than a return to an origin.
This persistence, the state of never quite arriving, shapes the artist’s titles as a whole. They are shifted, rearranged and held in suspension just like the materials of the works themselves. They are the sediment of a studio that is also a home, a habitat in which working and living have become indistinguishable. They read less like inventories and moreso like the contents of a pocket turned inside out: lint, tobacco, coffee, grease, dirt, nuts. They are not chosen but involuntarily shed, and so the body, with its residues, inscribes itself into the making of the works.
Ziehen is everything and nothing at once, neither the one nor the other, but all that may lie in between. Like the comma, it opens a possible new sentence without saying what comes next, and it holds open the space in which something might yet take shape. Vogel’s exhibition conceives of coherence not as conclusion but as a relation between open ends. Each element is a clause awaiting its continuation, and each pause is a state of being underway, of carrying on.
Text by Alix Steinhoff
Stefan Vogel, born 1981 in Fürth, currently lives in Leipzig. 2004-2012 University of Fine Arts, Hamburg; 2016 Villa Romana Prize, Florence; 2022 Fellowship of the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo.
Selected solo shows: 2025 G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig; 2024 Jahn und Jahn, Lisbon; 2024 Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; 2024 Kunstverein Gera; 2024 Galerie Michael Haas, Berlin; 2023 OFFICINA Project Space, Rome; 2023 Schönewald, Düsseldorf; 2022 Villa Massimo, Rome; 2022 Tichy Ocean Foundation, Zurich; 2021 Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; 2021 Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Kunstverein Lübeck; 2021 Jahn und Jahn, Munich; 2019 Schönewald, Düsseldorf; 2018 Lippische Gesellschaft für Kunst, Detmold; 2018 Vi, Vii, Oslo; 2017 Jahn und Jahn, Munich; 2015 Feinkunst Krüger, Hamburg.
Selected group shows: 2024 Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; 2023 Museum Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern; 2023, 2022 & 2019 G2 Kunsthalle Leipzig; 2022 Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; 2022 Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; 2020 Kunsthalle Bremen; 2020 Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; 2019 Kunstmuseum, Bonn; 2019 Kunstmuseum Bonn; 2019 Museum Gunzenhauser, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; 2019 Kunstverein Schwerin; 2019 Archiv Massiv, Leipzig; 2018 Museum Corvey, Höxter; 2018 Terzopiano, Lucca; 2017 Festspielhaus Hellerau; 2017 Kunstraum München, Munich; 2017 Kunstverein Hamburg.
Institutional and major collections which hold works by the artist include Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; Bundeskunstsammlung; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig; Langen Foundation, Neuss; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; The LBBW Collection, Stuttgart; Philara Collection, Düsseldorf; Tichy Art Foundation, Zurich.
