Inna Levinson & Walter Stöhrer 
Who am I? 

Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm

Generations of artists have reflected on their identity.

Walter Stöhrer (1937 – 2000 in Germany), an important representative of gestural and scriptural painting, expressed his individuality in opposition to the uniformity of post-war Germany, vehemently resisting petty-bourgeois conventions in his artistic practice.

Inspired by ancient philosophy as much as by Surrealists and the Beat Generation, he used to scribble often in a hardly-readable handwriting fragments of texts into the rich fabric of his canvases carrying on with his signature excessive painting process as a rebellious gesture.

Stöhrer‘s incessant struggle with himself, described by him as “Intrapsychic Realism”, is evident in the act of painting itself as well as in his distorted, sketchily outlined grimaces that keep reappearing on his canvases and that depict the depths of human experience.

In our increasingly digitalised age, the works by contemporary artist Inna Levinson (*1984 in Ukraine), on the other hand, analyse the supposedly liberal individualism that turns out to be an illusion. In her intense investigation of digital phenomena, she explores and questions the essence of reality. Her works are characterized by a specific grid-like structure that is made of colour pigment applied onto the medium surface. Oil paint is attached with spatula onto coarse burlap creating varying degrees of flatness, opacity and an interplay of depth and volume. The resulting pixel-like structure alternates between abstract shapes and blurred or distorted human forms. 

If Stöhrer in his works desperately embarked on a repeated search for himself between the realms of the real and the surreal, Levinson explores the fusion of reality and virtuality to experience the fleetingness of identity. (Text by Dr. Lily Fürstenow)