stamuli.artwork
About
Stamuli
Stamuli sees himself in the tradition and succession of affichistes and artists of décollage such as Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglés. In tear-off images, manipulated posters and fraying, layers of images are uncovered rather than joined together.
Stamuli goes further. The public space is deciphered through the display of details, by focussing on very specific elements of the image layers and found overpaintings.
In a process of decoupling and visualisation, Stamuli reveals the images and thus the intentions, while at the same time revealing the emotions and intentions of the city’s inhabitants and users.
The method is focussing. The whole becomes visible from the details. The predominant, dominant colours, strokes, materials and overlays emerge. Years, often decades, are depicted. These are views from the depths of the city, from which intentions can be experienced, relived.
The artist’s gaze leads to visualisation, the detail is the result, the sharpening through the details creates the overall view.
The man who pasted up a poster years ago, the woman who affixed protest leaflets above it, the construction worker who cleaned his tools on the wall – they are all the actual artists. Their work is the synthesis of time, they are the art.
Art is in the space, art is created in the process, the city lives in art.
Time itself has become an affiche, the result of the process.
Like Hains and Villeglé, Stamuli takes up the posters and walls and gates as painting material that is part of the urban space as an objet trouvé. The city constantly gives birth to the experimental fields of art, piling up the news of human joys, activities, tensions and protests, moulding them into Art brut contemporains.
Who is Stamuli
Herbert Starmühler (*1957), artist name Stamuli, lives and works in the Waldviertel (Lower Austria), in Morocco and near Vienna. Photographer and journalist (trend, profil, Die Presse, Kleine Zeitung, Berliner Zeitung, etc.) learnt image composition and painting from Hartmut Urban in Graz.
Stays in Luxembourg (RTL broadcaster), Munich (Bauer Verlag) and Berlin (freelance).
Editor-in-chief and publisher of specialist magazines such as PROSPECT (theatre technology), holzmagazin (architecture) and energie-bau (environment, energy).
Book publications and photographic work for his own platforms.
Catalogue raisonné and prices for the cycle “Voices from Marrakech” (2023) see www.galerie-Reinberg.com
CITY PICTURES
Stamuli draws pictures of cities. He photographs the city’s messages, changes them, paints over them, deciphers the messages, explains and exaggerates the signs on the wall.
Every city ticks differently, every city pulsates in different colours and nuances. People have written, affixed and painted on walls, doors and gates. They have posted their messages, sometimes as quiet as aspen leaves, sometimes doubtful and shy, sometimes loud and shouting.
Marrakech, Paris, Vienna – each city has a different handwriting. Stamuli shows us these hidden alphabets. The signs that we carelessly pass by.
By emphasising the characteristic parts of the engravings and brushwork and peeling them out of the whole, he shows us, who look at his works, how the city speaks to us.