STEFANIE POPP
I’m obsessed with mystical imagery of all cultures. Pretty much all of them include depictions of humans facing some force in the form of an animal or fantastic creature, and some of my favorite bits of painting are from that group of images, whether it is Uccelo’s Saint George who is fighting a dragon with butterfly-ish marks on his wings or a classical Indian rendition of Durga battling Mahishasura, the buffalo demon.
The yogic reading of those would be as metaphors for inner battles with „demons“ such as fear or anger, and that is one aspect of the creatures like the ones frolicking around in Gusano Coco. Although I always try to let the encounters limbo between dance and battle, e.g. like in Trigger Slave (2017). Apart from formal decisions I mainly try to stay in the realm of the subconscious. I always try to keep the paintings free of too much expression or “personality“, but to let them have that reflective and, if you wish, archetypical quality. When I first started painting, the only thing I knew for certain was that I wanted the paintings to “look“: to look at me while I was making them and then at the beholder. It was a mix of a joke, (you know, it’s such an art-historical theme “the painting and it’s gaze“) and a sincerely curious investigation.
My first figures were all cross-eyed, because I found it funny that the image was looking at itself, kind of imploding, but I was also playing with the metaphor of the artist and yogi looking inward not outward. – Stefanie Popp excerpt from The Interview with Bart Keijsers Koning
Stefanie Popp (1974), a German native living and working in cologne, she has extensively exhibited throughout Europe with four monograms and a series of group catalogues. Her work has been exhibited at Galerie Susanne Zander, Cologne; Kunstwerk, Cologne; Galerie Der Spiegel, Cologne; Marquise Gallery, Istanbul; Exile Gallery, Berlin; Fundacion Proa, Buenos Aires; Kunsthalle Recklinghausen; Zerofold, Koln; Norma Mangione Gallery, Italy; Galerie Norbert Arns, Koln.
Recent projects and exhibitions – Asterisms at Galerie Norbert Arns. The Interview online project with Keijsers Koning and Under Twin Moons at Norma Magione Gallery