David Stegmann (* 1982 in Freiburg im Breisgau) creates spaces. Impressive, deep landscapes open up in front of the viewer’s eyes, sometimes applied in free glazing technique with a broad brushstroke, sometimes in detailed cloud formations that condense over the wide horizon. He paints landscapes as imposing forces of nature, untouched and far from civilization. And he creates a cosmos of expressive abstractions that seem like an analogy of nature’s creative process. They form with great dynamic in free space, seem to rear up, literally explode, or float.
Already as a child, he painted and drew, and as a teenager, he came in contact with street art for the first time. He himself was one of its representatives, coining his own distinctive style under the name dust, invited to exhibitions, and awarded public contracts for large-format murals. It was characteristic of his works that he also accented them by using drawn elements, with webs of lines and contours in his painting, and gave his creations a particular deep-space effect through certain techniques. The formal liberties associated with street art, its stylistic devices, and technical finesse have entered his artistic repertoire.
Since 2015/16, David Stegmann has been developing new motifs, partly landscape-inspired, partly abstract, combined with a new colourfulness, executed with painting spatula and brush, in oil and acrylic. He makes use of the entire spectrum of painting and drawing techniques that he has acquired in the many years of his artistic work, and which seem to emancipate themselves from any objectivity and iconicity in his most recent paintings. His artistic style is unique, and in it hides the secret of the brilliant spatiality that characterizes all his works. All is nascent, involved in an ongoing dynamic, subject to constant change.
Dr. Heike Piehler
Born 1982 in Freiburg, Germany
Lives in Staufen, Germany
The common thread in my work is the return to the origin of nature, back to the symbiosis left by man. I depict the state of affairs after the apocalypse, or from a new sort of Big Bang, from which arises new life. I paint micro-macro-cosmos games with single and multi-cellular organisms.
Street Art-artig?, Interview
Artline Kunstmagazin, June 2013