Stephan dillemuth biography channel

The exhibition Smoke and Sound: A Revue in Pictures shows newly conceived works by Stephan Dillemuth, hand in hand with some older works from the 1980s. In the exhibition, the artist creates a new way of presenting his oeuvre, setting up site-specific scenes that have a certain theatricality, as well as an alluring effect.

Visitors enter the exhibition as if they were going through a time machine—two large canvases feature infinity clocks that point to 3:30. Through the mirroring of the large skylight in the floor, the revue can be experienced like a walk-in display case from a variety of angles. Colorful body parts hang from the ceiling, but it’s only by looking at them from one specific standpoint that viewers see the image of an entire human body. Other works also deal with the principle of fragmentation. Some human body parts are supplemented by animal components, such as boars’ heads, cattle ears, and deer feet, and are tied together with cogs.

Dillemuth’s first Bayernbilder inspired by sentimental postcard motifs from Bavarian spa towns, were painted in 1979 during his studies at the art academy in Düsseldorf. The painting style is accordingly neither expressive nor wild, but rather unintentional and trivial. Nevertheless, by ennobling the postcard into a fine art medium, Dillemuth’s work takes a critical twist.

In the Schönheitsgalerie (Gallery of Beauty, 1985), featuring over 50 works, Dillemuth explores questions of representation. As a collector of portraits of beautiful women, Bavaria’s King Ludwig I insisted that beauty was separate from status and social class. Thus, the portraits of aristocratic and bourgeois beauties hung next to each other in an egalitarian way. Dillemuth’s gallery, however, turns against the idea of external beauty and how it is represented in art. The paintings, like the faces, develop a life of their own through the process of painting, whi

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Sonia Abián (b. 1966 in Posadas, Argentina) lives and works in Barcelona. She began her artistic work as a painter, and later also turned to action art, video, and conceptual art. Dealing with archives and sound research form the starting point of her works.

Anna Artaker (b. 1976 in Vienna, Austria) lives and works as an artist in Vienna. She focuses on creating pictures connected to historiography or the relationship between photography and its subject.

Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela (b. 1676, d. 1736) was a chronicler in the viceroyalty of Peru, the region covered by present-day Bolivia.

Antonio de Ayanz (b. 1559 in Güendulain; d. 1598 in La Paz, Bolivia) was a Jesuit who in 1596 published a critical account of the working conditions of the Indios in the silver mines.

Monika Baer (b. 1964 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is an artist and lives and works in Berlin.

John Barker (b. 1948 in north London, Great Britain) lives and works as a writer and cultural critic in London. Barker regularly publishes political and culturecritical essays in the London publication Mute Magazine,among others.

Quirin Bäumler (b. 1965 in Weiden, Germany) is an artist living and working in Berlin. He graduated from the Fachschule für Holzbildhauerei in Oberammergau and the Kunstakademie in Munich. Together with other artists he founded the firm Sculpture Berlin in the German capital.

Gaspar Miguel de Berrio (b. 1706 in Potosí, Bolivia, d. 1762) was a painter, representative of the American Baroque, who worked in Potosí. He is catalogued as one of the chief exponents of the Potosí School, after Melchor Pérez de Holguín, whose disciple he had been.

Christian von Borries (b. 1969 in Zurich, Switzerland) is a conductor, composer, and producer. He lives in Berlin a

Martin Beck in conversation with Stephan Dillemuth

Martin Beck: In the late nineteen-seventies you studied painting in Düsseldorf, then lived in Chicago for a while and, in the late eighties, moved from there to Cologne. What was the motivation for that move?

Stephan Dillemuth: In Chicago I developed a great distance to my work as a painter and, more generally, everything that took itself so seriously in the German eighties art scene seemed ridiculous to me. This “laughter from outside” was on the one hand very liberating, but I noticed after about two years that I did not want to become an American artist, indeed could not do so, and realized I had to work with a cultural context that I was better able to read and understand. In Germany the hype around an entire generation of painters, such as the Mülheimer Freiheit group, seemed to have faded, and I moved to Cologne in 1989 because I felt I would find a more open situation there. By chance Christian Nagel, whom I knew from Munich, was looking for a space in Cologne at the time too. Texte zur Kunst was just being set up. Cologne seemed to be in the throes of upheaval.

M.B.: Did you arrive with the idea of opening an art space?

S.D.: I actually wanted to keep working on the disco decorations that I had made in Chicago, but that idea fell by the wayside almost immediately as I found an empty shop at Friesenwall. Suddenly more interesting questions arose—what could be done here other than using the space as a studio? But I did not want to become a gallerist, and running a producers’ gallery seemed too uncool to me. Back then, that was something you only did if you were a loser who could not get your work into a gallery any other way. People who do that neither doubt their self-image as artists nor call the artistic ambitions of the objects they produce into question; and they switch into self-help mode by seamlessly simulating a gallery. I had the vague ide