Angela Stauber

22 Mar

1. What does success mean to you as an artist?

Only the top of the iceberg is visible in the art world, although there is so much more happening underneath. Success is often defined in connection to what’s selling, the auction prices, and top exhibitions in established institutions. For me, success can be so many other things. It’s success if those artists, who I value and respect, know my work and value it positively and vice versa. It is also a success to have conversations and exchanges of a certain quality, connect with others, and show your work in an exhibition. It’s the absolute success in my eyes when an artist can constantly develop work up to the end of their life. It doesn’t always have to do with money.

2. What is the focus of your work at present?

For a long time, I have been observing spaces in my work. Instead of just relying on observation, this very last year I have been trying to find more associations including feelings and memories, and depicting all this mixture of perceptions through a search of images that reflect them. Every period has its understanding of paintings in connection with what’s happening in society, and I am trying to find images that reflect our present time. We live in a digital space, we don’t spend a lot of time doing something physical and we aren’t attached to nature either compared to previous generations. All of this has the effect of changing our perceptions, which is the topic at the centre of my work right now, and I try to find images about it. I play around a lot with dimensions and love doing large paintings as they offer me two dimensions to work with, the physical and the non-physical world, and you can walk near or look from a distance. At present, the main question I am trying to answer with my work is about what we feel towards the world. But there’s the pressure to prove certain themes for female artists with key players in the arts keen on exhibiting female artists whose work is related to problems or traumas they experienced in their life. In the visual arts, we should reach a point where we all self-reflect on our situations. Many female artists are already self-reflecting on those issues in other ways, without making it the focus of their work, and I also don’t deal with these themes in my work as I explore other topics.

3. Is your work related to architecture and space?

Yes, you could say so about my art practice. The truth is that themes such as space and architecture, and a medium such as painting, have been traditionally explored by male artists. Certainly, I believe that these topics don’t fit into a system based on gender as they apply and touch every human being in society. In my work, I want to find out about structures in society in a different way than what others have done so far as I want to see and represent them visually in my paintings. I am trying to find and paint visual forms about being held apart from something. Now I am working on projects in public spaces that I see as possibilities to show what can be accessed and what can’t. Of course, these are very political topics in our contemporary societies. They deal with space and access in terms of what you can or can’t enter about the public space.