GREGOR STEHLE AND THE ART OF GIVING SPACE TO SPACE.
prompt: space rooms
ROOM 2 OF THE EXHIBITION IS CURRENTLY BEING SET UP.
© konsum163
Blick in den raum 4 mit der Holzschnittserie “VOLLMONDNACHT” und der Fotografie “GRÖTZINGEN” (re). © konsum163
Ausschnitt aus dem Zyklus “ENTWÜRFE EINER AUSSTELLUNG” in Raum 3. © konsum163
The title as a provocation:
prompt: space.
The title of this exhibition is carefully chosen. Today, a “prompt” is the linguistic impulse that artificial systems use to generate images and realities. A single input is enough, and a seemingly coherent world emerges from the data. Gregor Stehle adopts this term—but only to turn it on its head. What occurs as a calculation in the digital sphere becomes a physical event here. Here, things are not generated, but established. Not simulated, but experienced.
There is almost something defiant about this. At a time when we are increasingly surrounded by perfectly rendered, algorithmically smoothed visual worlds, Stehle insists on the immediacy of real space. Not as a nostalgic gesture, but as a radical assertion of the present. For him, space is not a neutral container, not a passive backdrop, not an exhibition showcase. Space is the fabric of existence. It arises between things, in tensions, in the attraction and repulsion of elements. It is not there before something happens. It happens.
The subtitle*raumräume* makes precisely this visible. The word sounds almost tautological, yet it is a poetic condensation. It refers to spaces that generate space—spaces that are not content with architectural boundaries, but rather give rise to inner, mental, physical, and atmospheric expansions. So what you’re entering here is not an exhibition about space. You’re entering an experimental setup in which space itself becomes an actor.
Space as a Relationship
The Complete Works of Gregor Stehle can be distilled into a single sentence: Space is relationship. At first glance, this idea sounds simple, but in reality it represents a fundamental shift. For here, space is not understood geometrically—not as a measurable order, not as a volume between walls. Rather, space emerges where one thing comes into connection with another: a line with a surface, a field of color with a void, an object with the visitor’s body, a gesture with the silence that surrounds it.
In this context, Stehle speaks of an art in which individual elements function as attractors. The term “attractoral art,” coined by the gallery, captures his practice so well because it describes a dynamic: a line, a field of color, or a placement are never merely formal components of a composition. They attract perception. They create fields. They interact with space because they establish relationships before they convey meanings.
This also shifts the question of what an image actually is. It is no longer an object that represents something. It is a space of events. A field of tension. A condensed form of presence. And it is precisely here that we find the connection to the philosophical concepts that shape Stehle, without his art ever becoming a mere illustration of them.
Kant, for example, understood space not as a property of things, but as a condition of our intuition. Sloterdijk describes space as a sphere of co-being, as a membrane of relationships, as lived coexistence. Heidegger conceived of the work of art as something that opens up the world and makes space possible in the first place. Finally, François Jullien teaches a way of thinking about effect, unfolding, and the atmospheric, in which it is not the clearly defined thing but its effect within the field that is decisive. In Stehle’s work, these lines converge—not theoretically, but sensually. His art thinks without lecturing. It does not argue. It creates.
one} PIANO ROOM
200 x 300 cm, 2026, chair and tarp
two} GREEN SPACE
50 x 40 cm, 2026, tape on canvas
three} FULL MOON NIGHT II
63 x 37 cm, 1995, woodcut
four} BOOK OF SPACES
32 x 40 cm, 1998, handmade book
five} AND THE ROOM CARRIED ME AWAY
120 x 100 x 3 cm, 2026, oil on canvas
six} DRAFT 3
70 x 100 cm, 2026, pencil and wax crayon on paper
seven} DRAWING 2
70 x 100 cm, 2026, pencil and wax crayon on paper
(c) konsum163
First Room: The Reset of Painting
At first glance, the first room of this exhibition seems almost austere. Minimalism defines everything. Primed canvas, tape, lines, splashes of color. Few elements, clear choices. And yet this room is anything but empty. Rather, it takes us back to a point that could be called the “reset” of painting: wall, surface, color, material. Nothing more. But also nothing less.
Stehle does not begin here with a motif. He begins with the conditions of appearance. It is precisely in this that the sharpness of this approach lies. For in an art world that often relies on one-upmanship, narration, or the production of symbols, he insists on the elementary. Blue is blue. Black is black. Adhesive tape remains adhesive tape. And yet, perception shifts. The surface becomes a threshold; the line opens up an interior that was not there before; and suddenly, the space oscillates between the wall, the work, and the gaze.
Nothing about it is loud. But everything is effective.
These works provoke not through gesture, but through withdrawal. They resist quick comprehension and thereby sharpen something that has long since become dulled in everyday life: the perception of one’s own presence in space. One does not stand before them as one would before a picture that “shows something.” One enters into a relationship. And perhaps that is precisely their true precision: that they do not depict the surface, but rather transform it into a field of attraction, openness, and condensation. Gregor Stehle says: “I don’t want to represent. I want to create. The viewer should not recognize, but feel.” This is not an anti-intellectual program. On the contrary. It is a radical shift from recognition to experience.
Zen, Emptiness, and the Clarity of the Moment
Anyone who wants to understand Gregor Stehle’s work cannot ignore his decades-long practice of Zen. It is neither a biographical footnote nor a mere decorative form of spirituality that could easily be woven into artist legends. It is part of his attitude. Part of his method. Perhaps even part of that inner discipline from which his art derives its distinctive decisiveness. Stehle does not work from a plan. He begins with a white surface and waits—days, weeks, sometimes longer. He lives with the canvas. He empties himself into it. Only when no inner image rises anymore, when the referential has been exhausted—that is, when nothing is longer “meant” or “intended”—can the act of painting take place. Then comes a moment of clarity—and with it, the action. Quick, direct, uncorrected. Whatever remains afterward stays. Or is discarded.
There is something decidedly non-Western about this practice, because it rejects the ideal of perpetual optimization. The work is not improved, not refined, not retrospectively imbued with psychological meaning. It is the trace of a moment that was possible only once. In this sense, Stehle’s painting is not a construction of authenticity, but a risk. The painting must be true—or it is nothing. He himself puts it with great rigor: “There are genuine and inauthentic paintings. A genuine painting has created itself. It was necessary. It surprised me. It doesn’t need me.” This is a harsh but productive definition. It removes art from both arbitrariness and pure craftsmanship. A painting isn’t good simply because it works. It is good when it has become necessary.
Second Room: The Piano Room, or the Condensation of the Interior
In the second room, the atmosphere changes noticeably. After the austere precision of the opening, you enter a setting that feels denser, more physical, almost more intimate. Here, the space does not expand but rather implodes into an interior. The objects take on a different relationship to one another: a piano bench, a wall installation, a sculpturally folded form on the floor. It is an ensemble that creates more atmosphere than narrative. The piano itself is missing—and is present precisely because of that. The empty space begins to resonate. One senses absence as presence. The space is no longer merely architecturally charged, but emotionally so, without becoming sentimental. The floor seems to move, to fold, to recoil. The sculpture titled “And the Space Carried Me Away” is not a statement, but a movement in material form. It turns the floor into an event. Stability becomes drift. Here it is particularly evident that Stehle does not conceive of space as a static entity. It is intensity. It is charge. It is a state that involves the body. Perhaps that is why his works, despite all their reduction, never appear cold or formalistic. They possess a quiet yet very concrete physicality. Nothing illustrates a feeling—and yet feeling is present in the space. Here, too, a statement by the artist offers insight: “I hang pictures in spaces, not on walls.” That sounds casual, but it says it all. For it implies that the work never exists in isolation. It lives in relation to the location, the height, the emptiness, the visitor’s path, the light, and the distance. It is not a surface, but an aura.
PIANO ROOM
200 x 300 cm, 2026, chair and tarp
UNTITLED
155 x 250 cm, 2026, acrylic paint on Steinway stencil
GREEN SPACE
50 x 40 cm, 2026, tape on canvas
BOOK OF SPACES
32 x 40 cm, 1995, handmade book
I MUST GO IN, FOG IS RISING
80 x 60 cm, 2026, oil on canvas
EXHIBITION DRAWINGS 42
70 x 10 cm, 2026, pencil and wax crayon on paper
PROMPT:SPACE SPACES – Images from an Exhibition. ©konsum163
Third Space: Designs for an Exhibition—The Space Within Us
The third room could easily be misunderstood. Twelve drawings, an artist’s book, architectural impressions, lines of perspective, color schemes—at first glance, all of this looks like preparatory work, like sketches, like preliminary stages. Yet this is precisely where the productive mistake lies. These works are not preparatory pieces. They are not means to a later work. They are the work itself. The title “Designs for an Exhibition” is deliberately ambiguous. It refers to planning—and at the same time subverts it. What becomes visible here is not the construction of a space, but its emergence in thought. Lines intertwine, perspectives shift, and color fields open up without becoming fixed. These are not fixed architectural structures, but possibilities. Here, the space is not built, but in the process of becoming. And it is precisely into this process of becoming that the viewer is inevitably drawn. One begins to experience the spaces—with the eyes, with bodily memory, with one’s own imagination. One fills in the gaps, shifts perspectives, and mentally enters what is only hinted at. The drawing becomes a threshold. The design becomes an experience. The image becomes a process. Here, a central shift in Stehle’s thinking becomes apparent: the work is no longer what lies before us. It is what happens within us.
The artist’s book *Book of Spaces* takes this idea a step further. It is not a documentation, not an archive, not a traditional artist’s catalog. It is a kind of walk-through imagination. An architecture that unfolds not in space, but through reading. Page by page, an inner space emerges—one that is not closed off, but constantly opens up further. You read—and move. You see—and fill in the gaps. You are no longer on the outside, but right in the middle of it. In this body of work, it becomes perhaps most evident that Stehle does not work with images, but with conditions of perception. He does not show what a space looks like. He shows how space comes into being.
Room Four: Origin, Nature, Dissolution
The final room leads back to a point that is both the beginning and the end. Earlier works, photographs, woodcuts—and yet this is not a biographical retrospective. Rather, a question that runs through the entire body of work takes on greater significance:
How is space even possible—and what does that mean for our existence? A photograph shows someone bathing in a lake. No staging, no pathos, no narrative. And yet something is immediately palpable: the sensation of being carried, of being enveloped, of being embedded in a sphere that is not an object but a state of being. Here, space is not something we observe. It is something that holds us. A second work—an unassuming detail from a landscape—seems almost casual at first glance. And yet it opens up a radical perspective: here, the world appears not as a subject but as an experience. Not as something we see, but as something in which we are. The woodcuts of “Full Moon Night” take this shift a step further. They do not show the moon, nor the event, nor the scene. They show light. Atmosphere. Change. Each print is different; each moment is shifted. There is no definitive image—only variations on a state. And then, at the end, this line: “I must go in, the fog is rising.” A line by Emily Dickinson that Stehle takes up, not as a quotation, but as an opening. Here, the space finally dissolves from any sense of solidity. It becomes fog, transition, dissolution. And yet even this is not a vanishing into nothingness. It is another form of presence. Perhaps that is the most radical insight of this final space: that dissolution is not the opposite of space. Rather, it is its logical extension.
The Room Reflects on the Past
What remains after this exhibition? No definitive answer. No clearly articulable conclusion. No message that can be condensed into a single sentence. And that is precisely where its strength lies. prompt: space. raumräume is not an exhibition that makes a claim. It is an exhibition that sets something in motion. A shift that is barely perceptible at first—and only unfolds in retrospect. You leave the rooms and perhaps only realize once outside that something has changed. Your perspective is different. Your perception is more refined. Space is no longer taken for granted. Gregor Stehle puts it with an almost casual clarity: “My paintings do not seek meaning. They seek to be a space in which the viewer is also allowed to be.” This is a quiet yet radical claim. For it frees art from the obligation to make a statement and returns it to something more fundamental: to experience. To existence. To feeling. At a time when images must become ever faster, louder, and more unambiguous, this exhibition focuses on the opposite: on emptiness, on reduction, on openness—not as a retreat, but as an intensification.
Space as a Possibility
Perhaps the crucial aspect of *prompt: space. Raumräume* is that it does not define space, but rather reveals it. That it does not explain it, but makes it tangible. That it does not tell us what to see—but reminds us that we are seeing at all. And perhaps this is precisely where something begins that points beyond this exhibition. The realization that space isn’t simply there. That it isn’t a given, but rather emerges. Between things. Between bodies. Between perceptions. And that we ourselves are part of this process. Or, to put it once more in Stehle’s words: “I place something in the plane—and then the space begins to think me.” Perhaps that is the true movement of this exhibition. That in the end, we no longer merely perceive the space, but that the space begins to perceive us.
SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS – The ArtistBook by Gegor Stehle
Grgor Stehle’s ArtistBook provides an overview of the artist’s complete body of work.
