The painting bodies are a genuine invention of Peter Stohrer. In them, the painter, stage designer, space-affine curator and ever-building artist created his own space, a three-dimensional field of possibilities. Just as Piet Mondrian, the Constructivists or Frank Stella’s Shaped Canvases, for all their commitment to the surface, refused to see the painting surface as a self-contained quadrilateral, the painted bodies assert themselves as a complex space of their own. Dialogically, as a space within a space, they communicate with the exhibition situation, are sometimes more the body of the painting, sometimes more a window sill or book shelf.
This Stohrer-specific in-between responds to Jacques Rancière’s demand that works of art, in the sense of their own political mode of action, must mark and endure in themselves the tension between art and life.

Installation 2000: 2000, paradigmatically engages in this balancing act that pervades 20th century art: The multi-part work stretches horizontally across two central exhibition walls, aligned with the vertical shadow line of a corner of the room. Each element balances within itself the rawness of a chipboard and the painterly colour glaze. If an apparently finished panel painting is found in the colour/shape constellation that spans the wall, it is absorbed by a simple wooden section in the neighbouring object. Individuality and a sense of community, delimiting difference and connecting lines such as colour references, art and incorporated furniture elements – what one sees here is painting, sculpture, installation, symbol and statement at the same time: artistic practice and life practice in open-pored balance.