German artist
Stefan Kürten (born 1963) is a contemporary German artist who lives and works in Düsseldorf. Known for his intricate paintings of domestic and urban landscapes, Kürten has exhibited extensively since 1984 and his work is held in a number of collections in Europe and the United States.
Life and career.
Stefan Kürten was born in 1963 in Düsseldorf. After studying Philosophy and English at Heinrich Heine University, he enrolled at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and studied painting with Michael Buthe, receiving his MA in 1989. He then moved to San Francisco, where he studied and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute during the early 1990s. Kürten has since taught at various institutions, such as Hochschule für Künste, Bremen (from 2002-2003), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2010), School of Art and Design, Alfred University (2012), and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (since 2014).
Kürten's paintings depict natural and built environments or interiors while often incorporating decorative or ornamental motifs culled from wallpaper and textile design. Devoid of any human presence, Kürten's work typically showcases spaces and buildings marked by daily life and use but seemingly abandoned or vacated, in many cases allowing plants and natural life to encroach and overtake the space. However, he rejects a strictly futuristic or prophetic reading of his work; in a conversation with Lawrence R. Rinder, director of BAM/PFA, he speaks to the hauntological nature of his paintings: "It is more concerned with the present, the way we feel and experience ourselves and our environments now, and of course the past, as we access our memories be they 'true' or 'false.' The futuristic quality in my images is something from the future, but it's a future from the past, an optimism laden with bright promises and bedeviled by moral imperatives."
Alongside his career in painting, Kürten also makes music under his own name and with the band Elena Farr, and played guitar in the group Superbilk from 1995 to 1999.
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