Esther Stocker – Präzision und Flüchtigkeit (Precision and Volatility)
Galerie Scheffel
06 September 2024 - 19 October 2024

Info

In her unmistakable works – always in black and white – Esther Stocker deals with geometric patterns whose precise order she breaks up and undermines through subtle deviations. Galerie Scheffel is pleased to present current works by the internationally acclaimed artist from 6 September to 19 October 2024 in the exhibition “Esther Stocker – Precision and Volatility”. On display are numerous paintings by Stocker as well as a selection of her well-known ‘creased objects’: wall and floor sculptures that look like giant crumpled balls of paper and transfer painting from the surface to the three-dimensional.

In her paintings, sculptures and installations, Esther Stocker visualizes the supposed precision of systems as a fleeting phenomenon. From lines, surfaces and simple formal elements, she develops ever new variations of geometric patterns, rhythmic orders and grid structures in black and white, whose systematics she simultaneously disrupts through deliberate interventions – through deviations, superimpositions, shifts or gaps. “I am interested in transformation and how simple signs create confusion,” says Stocker. “I want the forms to detach themselves from our expectations and use the precision of a system to question the system itself.”

The visual disruptions and irritations in Stocker's works play with our habits of perception and our understanding of order. The simultaneity of the expected and the unexpected, of order and disorder, clarity and ambivalence activates our imagination and opens up a mental space. The artist thus invites us to reflect on social relationships and structures, to pursue existential questions and to think in terms of complex interrelationships. This formal and intellectual freedom is also conveyed by the paradoxical titles of the exhibited works, which refer to their own absence and thus to the works themselves: “Untitled”.

The various, mostly large-format paintings in the current exhibition provide an insight into the diversity of Esther Stocker's formal language, the rich variety of her expansive structural systems: sometimes a grid structure appears in parts broken by slightly offset lines and the eye instinctively attempts to reconnect them, at times offset lines seem to form new shapes in individual sections of a striped pattern. Sometimes spiral lines are arranged on the picture surface, sometimes we see galaxies of triangles or squares of different sizes, whose arrangement and density vary. At other times, blank spaces create patterns in the pixel-like segmentation of the picture surface, or squares seem to detach themselves from the structure of the overall composition through their rotation. But these and other paintings by Esther Stocker always raise questions about the relationship between their elements, about the relationship between system and chaos, reality and illusion, surface and space, distance and proximity, precision and volatility.

The exhibition also presents a number of her so-called ‘creased sculptures’, all also ‘Untitled’, which Esther Stocker creates as floor objects or as works hanging from the wall or ceiling. For these works, Stocker prints her images on PVC or aluminium cardboard and, by carefully folding and creasing this flat source material, transforms it into three-dimensional bodies that resemble carelessly crumpled paper balls. Here, Stocker creates visual disruptions in the patterns – at times additionally – through the folds and curvatures of the surface. These sculptures can be seen as a symbol of the artistic creative process, of the creation and discarding of ideas, whereby the artist’s hand is once more expressed in the act of crumpling. Stocker herself says: ‘I like the reference to paper as an important carrier material for culture.’

Esther Stocker, born in Silandro, Italy, in 1974, studied painting from 1994 to 2000, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. While still a student, Stocker was able to take part in her first exhibitions with her paintings. Since then, she has received numerous art awards for her work, which she has meanwhile expanded from murals to huge façade designs, extensive room installations and large sculptures in the public space. Her works are represented internationally in public as well as private art collections. The Vienna-based artist regularly exhibits her works worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, particularly throughout Europe, in the USA and in Asia.

The  exhibition is open Tuesdays to Fridays from 2 to 7pm and Saturdays from 11am to 3pm.

We are happy to provide press photos free of charge.

Download press release (PDF) →