STEFAN HIRSIG | Neue Welt

In a restless exchange of movement, gesture and texture, Stefan Hirsig‘s work has always questioned what painting is capable of and what abstraction can be. Integrating a rich pool of references from classical and modern painting, pop culture and today’s oversaturated media, his dynamic compositions bear witness to the hyper-connected, always-on cacophony of our present moment. Yet Hirsig’s imagery resists quick consumption. If you look long enough, you’ll discover a processual logic: marks made like chess moves, a series of calculated responses, both destructive and creative; sometimes in opposition, sometimes in dance.

In a restless exchange of movement, gesture and texture, Stefan Hirsig‘s work has always questioned what painting is capable of and what abstraction can be. Integrating a rich pool of references from classical and modern painting, pop culture and today’s oversaturated media, his dynamic compositions bear witness to the hyper-connected, always-on cacophony of our present moment. Yet Hirsig’s imagery resists quick consumption. If you look long enough, you’ll discover a processual logic: marks made like chess moves, a series of calculated responses, both destructive and creative; sometimes in opposition, sometimes in dance.

The centerpiece of the exhibition – a large format canvas entitled 'Eskalation’ – features a sprawl of fragmented figures whose composition recalls the dense and riotous scenes of history paintings such as Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women, or Delacroix’s Death of Sardanaplus. Dominated by bright red and a deep, patriotic blue, the painting seems barely able to contain the flaying limbs, grasping fingers and glimpsed faces that make up its tangled mass. Eschewing a singular focal point, the painting compels the eye to join these figures in their chaotic motion, flitting between scrawled outlines and corporeal density without settling on a single detail. 

In juxtaposition to this work, Hirsig presents a series of paintings with a considerably calmer, more grounded tone. Depicting abstracted female figures, these works represent Hirsig’s answer to the question of how the world can be liberated and healed from its cycle of upheavals, displacement and violence by nurturing a more feminine view of the world: choosing the creative rather than the destructive as the guiding principle of conflict resolution and replacing blind hatred with compassion. In this way, Neue Welt expresses Hirsig's ongoing commitment to the diversity and ambivalence of human nature, in which the vibrant plurality of his compositions comes to represent a radical gesture of tolerance.