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Galerie Hammelehle und Ahrens presents Stephan Jung : Host 2 - 22 Jan to 23 Mar 2005


Despite the fact that this involves an artist who paints and his paintings, it would a waste of effort to approach the paintings via the painting operation. Stephan Jung is not interested in painting except as a means to an end and his paintings are not picturesque. They are not improvisations, there are no competing coatings and motives superimposed, no action-orientated superimposition, juxtaposition or interwovenness, in other words no ascertainable painting activism.

Installation view Hammelehle und Ahrens, 2005

His way of painting can be compared with the flat copying or imitating of the photo-realists. Painting becomes a variable game with colour and motif by means of a frame. Established parameters such as technical procedures, limitation to certain motifs and standardised formats, on which new motif cut-outs are tuned, make series possible where colours, structures and forms change in fine and hardly perceptible gradations. The same thing is always different and diversified. The sum of the parameters produce the style which has become typical for Jung.


An artificial extract from reality is copied whose more or less abstract structures and processes are imitated and woven into something new, the object depicted. In order to best transfer or transform the seductive and polished aesthetics of shaped glass, metal and other materials and objects into the next medium, the picture, Jung uses photos, printed media and household utensils as models.

There are models for practically all pictures, including those whose shape and structure textures seem like pure inventions - colourful, shadow-casting of light or bright colour spots which seem to absorb ornamental linkages without depiction content out of their own rules. The painted picture frees itself from the model, whether a photo or a concrete object, and becomes independent of it. Abstraction arises from distortion. This is why Jung�s pictures move around in a zone between realism and abstraction. The definitive lies in seeing and in the surface, in the difference between object and picture, the non-hierarchical iconography of the mundane. - Giti Nourbakhsch in Cat. "Stephan Jung",Galerie Hammelehle und Ahrens, Stuttgart 1997


Images :
Top left - Host #4, 2004, oil on canvas. 104 1/3 x 90 1/2 inches (265 x 230 cm)
Top right - Host #2, 2003, oil on canvas, 104 1/3 x 90 1/2 inches (265 x 230 cm
Left - Installation view, Hammelehle und Ahrens, 2005.
Bottom left - Host #3, 2004, oil on canvas. 104 1/3 x 90 1/2 inches (265 x 230 cm)
Bottom right - Host #1, 2003, oil on canvas. 104 1/3 x 90 1/2 inches (265 x 230 cm)