Stefan Stößel »Calypso«
April 28 to June 16, 2007
Leipzig Gallery Weekend:
Saturday, April 28 from 11am to 9pm | 10pm party in Bimbo Town
Sunday, April 29 from 11am to 6pm
New exhibitions in all the galleries in the »Baumwollspinnerei« [former cotton spinning mill]

We are especially pleased to present Stefan Stößel [*1970], one of the Leipzig painters working in the Baumwollspinnerei, at Filipp Rosbach Galerie.

Piling Them High. Is anyone unfamiliar with the winning smile of Uncle Tuca? Banana boxes are omnipresent, including in their function as paraphernalia for moving. They are easy to acquire, handy to use, sufficiently stable, unvarying in format, and on top of it all: stackable. Whatever has to move to a new location or merely be put out of sight for awhile can be compactly stored in them. Of course, the re-used box is less a site of archiving than of amnesia, since what is stored in it cannot be surveyed or used. The order that seems to be created by precise layering and stacking has something conditional and preliminary about it - and precisely that is what Stefan Stößel thinks makes it worth turning into a visual image. His box pictures are devoted to the three-dimensional containers in an emphatically flat painting that always keeps the painting surface present. Obviously provisional arrangements can lay claim to permanence at least as paintings and, on the other hand, indicate that the stuff hidden in the boxes, along with the boxes themselves, are only waiting to spread around the room in disorder again.

Stößel's nuance-rich painting knows how to strike poetic sparks even from the barrenness of gray cardboard and the indefinable color of brown adhesive tape. Even without a figurative imprint, his boxes already seem like pictures because of their cut-out openings whose dense, colored filling, for example in Bonita, indicates the disorder whose [futile] overcoming seems to be the point. The enclosing and covering boxes thus become illustrative charts of suppressed peinture, drowned out by quotations of the prefabricated. Devoted to the cheap and the always available, Stefan Stößel relinquishes everything that revels and uses his eminent technique unostentatiously. In contrast stands the self-praise like »Premium Pack«, »Sun Royal«, and »Special Selection«, whose undeservedness is obvious. Stößel's conscious picture husks, which (in a doubled sense) do without depth, unite aspects of pretentiousness and of reserve, of the promise of pleasure and of sobriety, of overregulation and of laissez faire, of disciplined virtuosity and of cunning imposture.

Heiko Damm, art historian, excerpt from the catalog »Figuración alemana actual«, 2006

Calypso, a form of satirical-critical song popular in the West Indies.
Calypso, in Greek mythology, a nymph who saved the shipwrecked Odysseus and kept him with her for seven years [from kalypso »veil, conceal«].

The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 6pm
For additional information and viewing appointments, call: 0172. 373 11 10.
Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, and Jörg Rosbach look forward to your visit.