Artists

Arjan Stockhausen

Press release

Das Unüberwachte

Cologne, March 15, 2025, slightly cloudy and windy

Dear Arjan,

Every image in the exhibition space seems humbled by the nature outside. They are shy, yet ethereal. Animals, bodies, and figures turn away from me, decaying and dissolving under my gaze. Behind my eyes, they become self-sufficient, transforming into an unobserved thought—spreading like an obsessive idea.

The Unsupervised is the dreamlike, the elusive, the surreal force that seeps into my mind like a parasite, endlessly evolving, shifting beyond control. It is an in-between space, where consciousness wrestles with the unconscious—a space even I cannot fully enter.

Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1798 that the theory of the novel should itself be a novel. The images in this exhibition hover between their own autonomous existence and the articulation of their own theory. Much like Pop Art once did—though without its seriality—these works carry their discourse within them. Brilliantly blue geometric forms tear through romantic landscapes like a modern kind of pain. Bodies melt, fragment, and disturb any naive perception. Today I would have liked nothing more than to relax.

And yet, the Barsois are here, guiding me through the exhibition like Thanatos and Hypnos—messengers from a realm beyond logic. Like the early Romantic fragment, these images seem to celebrate their own incompleteness, their imperfection in relation to the world. They resist final interpretation, compelling me to return to them, to look again and again.

Again and again, I find myself walking in crossing steps along the walls of the White Cube. I rise, like Lazarus, yet each time in a new form. I am Iphigenia, longing for home. I am the fragmented Pentheus, my limbs torn apart. I am the child of Hermes and Venus, my body fused with Salmakis.

The images and I exist in relation to one another. We reference and contradict each other, or so I believe. They remain in motion, while I remain unfinished and unfulfilled—tired and imperfect, yet at least renewed with each cycle.

The Unsupervised is the uncontrolled—it emerges as form within my mind, breaking through.

Best regards,
Anne L. Kaufmann

Arjan Stockhausen was born in Alfter in 1992 and lives and works in Cologne. His work oscillates between figuration and abstraction, intertwining poetic narratives with visual art and sound. Stockhausen’s pieces exist in the tension between narration and deconstruction, questioning both their own readability and the perception of perception itself.