KATHARINA STADLER
TEXTS
THINKING ABOUT FEELING
solo show | Jarmuschek + Partner
September 13–October 25, 2025
Short vertical stripes alternate between bright pink and radiant violet with various shades of green, forming an elongated horizontal band. The set pieces in Katharina Stadler's large-format work Play 2014 appear to be excerpts from an unusually colored rainbow or a colorful barcode. Each color field is individually applied to the fabric by the painter, there are overlaps and small gaps that make it clear to the viewer that they were created by human hands, that this is not about clean, straight lines. Katharina Stadler layers several of these striped fabric bands on top of each other and joins them with crooked, sometimes downright curvy seams; a physical act that highlights the object character of the so-called image carrier. The offset sewn color areas form an idiosyncratic pattern that seems to waver slightly, reminiscent of camera shake—pink and purple paths that jump back and forth in the green. One almost feels caught when one notices that the own brain is constantly searching for supposed perfection. It seems comforting that there is a textile frame with which the artist sews her color fields, seeming to tame them in a sensitive way, creating a balance between order and irritation.
With her title Thinking about Feeling, Katharina Stadler refers to the often seemingly self-evident duality of what are probably the two most complex and challenging human abilities to understand: thinking and feeling, head and gut. Supposedly, feeling stands for the chaotic and unpredictable, while thinking is usually associated with the opposite. But is that really true?
To visualize her experiences, memories, and reflections, the artist finds her means of expression in colors, silhouettes, and, more recently, in gestural strokes—form follows feeling. The boundaries between the subconsciously created and the intentionally directed seem to blur. Feelings and thoughts, it seems, manifest themselves and form a common, dynamic whole. Areas of color and brushstrokes intertwine, interpenetrate, and overlap, ending in one part of the picture only to begin again in a different way in the next or the one after that. The intuitive dance of colors extends across large areas of the picture in works such as Poor Pigeon or Watching the Sky Fall Apart. The frame, however, remains, enveloping the lively, often multi-part interior like a taming and protective layer of skin.
Without knowing the actual background, viewers gain a sense of the moods, emotional charges, and intellectual impulses reflected in the images through the coloring and brushwork of the abstractly painted pieces of fabric. Sometimes more, sometimes less, shades, contrasts, and surfaces create an image space with a specific depth that invites contemplation. With their symbolic potential, the works encourage a reflection on boundaries and finiteness. Again and again, one can start this anew without having to discard what has already been recognized. [iw]
Katharina Stadler was born in Oberhausen in 1995 and lives in Düsseldorf. She began studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 2014, first studying fine art under Prof. Andreas Gursky, then painting under Prof. Thomas Scheibitz. In 2021, she graduated as a master student of Prof. Thomas Scheibitz. Katharina Stadler was represented in the curated exhibition Academy POSITIONS at the POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair in 2020. Along with four other members of Prof. Thomas Scheibitz's class, her work was shown in the group exhibition Accurate Glitch in 2022 and in the solo exhibition HAPPY-GO-LUCKY at Jarmuschek + Partner as well as at salondergegenwart in Hamburg in 2023. In 2025, the Ars Sacrow art association presented her works in the highly acclaimed exhibition Gegen den Strich–Die Generation Z in der Kunst (Against the Grain–Gen Z in the Arts, curated by Michael Thoss and Dr Dietmar Peikert).
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HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
solo show | Jarmuschek + Partner
May 13–June 17, 2023
The high-contrast, bold colors of shadowy shapes and surfaces run along the fabric fields delimited by seams in Katharina Stadler's object-like paintings. Each play of color and form is able to reach the viewer immediately on an emotional level and evoke rorschach-like associations. Yet in their interconnection, the sewn and painted cotton pieces are complex collages that challenge and puzzle. Each lot is not only special and unique as a surface, but also works in a specific pictorial depth, as its own pictorial universe in which one can immerse oneself, and which nevertheless interacts and connects with the whole in a mysterious way.
Katharina Stadler's large-scale compositions are capable of evoking moments of contemplative tranquility and, at the same time, feelings of joyful lightheartedness. She imagines the colors of her works at the beginning and then lets thoughts, memories and dreams flow into the multi-part painting process. From image-formed streams of consciousness she finally puts together something new, something different. Deconstruction and re-creation can be read here as a reference to human processing with what is experienced, imagined and felt.
Not systematic or static, but consciously and visibly manual, intuitively and individually man-made, the color-intensive works of Katharina Stadler are able to touch us as viewers. The artist deals freely and unconstrained with her chosen medium as well as with the genre of painting. When she sews a frame around the color surfaces with unpainted pieces of cotton, she seems to playfully, almost cheekily, make us aware of our acquired habits of seeing and trained expectations of images. She thus creates an image around the actual picture. Background, empty space and frame at the same time, these "edge pieces" may also point us to the indispensability of the image carrier for painting, to the materiality of images in general and their multidimensionality. Despite the fact that the individual seams at least form sovereign and clearly ordering internal boundaries, one may doubt the boundaries of the whole in view of its fragmentary nature. And yet Katharina Stadler is not concerned with the conceptual. Rather, with her seemingly light, balancing compositions, she ingeniously succeeds in finding images for our often diffuse and sometimes chaotic inner worlds.
Katharina Stadler was born in Oberhausen in 1995 and lives in Düsseldorf. From 2014 she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, first free art with Prof. Andreas Gursky, then painting with Prof. Thomas Scheibitz. In 2021 she graduated as a master student of Prof. Thomas Scheibitz. Already in 2020, Katharina Stadler has been represented in the curated exhibition Academy POSITIONS at the POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair. With four other positions of Prof. Thomas Scheibitz's class she was presented last year in the group exhibition Accurate Glitch at Jarmuschek + Partner. HAPPY-GO-LUCKY is the first solo exhibition at the gallery.