›De Constance à Paris (et return)‹ 29/3/2025—16/5/2025

• Stefanie Scheurell

Constance 29/3/2025— 16/5/2025

Opening: Saturday, March 29, 2025 at 6 p.m.

In her work, artist Stefanie Scheurell creates a unique visual world and challenges socially ingrained ideals of female beauty. Using the décollage technique, she literally and symbolically breaks through the flat, superficial worlds of motifs and images defined by artificially established social norms. Scheurell radically tears or selectively removes multi-layered posters, then reworks and consciously reinterprets them. In this way, she reveals her highly individual visual language, which she uses to defy the systemic consensus conveyed by the cosmetics and fashion industries. Her latest and exclusive works, created during her artist residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2024 and 2025, primarily depict models in conventional poses advertising products from well-known fashion brands.

Cut-out, floral, and mask-like paper forms by the artist partially obscure faces, while the brand names familiar to us all are only fragmentarily identifiable. The depicted textiles are expanded in form through intentionally placed tears, acquiring a boundless character.

In Stefanie Scheurell's creative process, fashion posters permeated by dogmatized and idealized structures are confronted with the accusation of superficiality, consumer-oriented materiality and untruthfulness, redefined and analyzed with a feminist perspective that reaches deep beneath the surface.

Inspired by the Parisian artist group the Affichistes, active in the French capital in the mid-20th century, Stefanie Scheurell's works offer sharp criticism of gender stereotypes, consumerism, and societal structures, radically and decisively rejecting traditional and conservative values. The artist builds upon the Affichistes' activism, revealing the profound nature of human beings in her work.

The result is an unrestrained, impulsive and loud aesthetic that encourages viewers to open their eyes, to look behind dogmatic ideals of beauty with an open mind, and to reshape them freely and respectfully.

In her oeuvre, she utilizes the media of photography, painting, drawing, video, text, and ceramics, thus creating intermedial connections. The artist offers multifaceted and intimate insights into far-reaching themes that move between nature, identity, capitalism, and feminism, creating new perspectives.

Stefanie Scheurell was born in Berlin in 1980 and studied at the State Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe and at the Berlin University of the Arts in the class of Professor Rebecca Horn. She lives and works in Konstanz and Berlin and has received numerous awards, most recently the prestigious artist grant from the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.