Stefan Löffelhardt

As a sculptor, Stefan Löffelhardt develops sculptural and (photo)graphic landscapes. In doing so, he uses everyday materials, such as packaging film, wood, plaster, wire, glass, and also discarded objects. Since 2009, large-format pencil drawings have been added to the repertoire of his artistic work. Stefan Löffelhardt traces the process of constant becoming and change in his works. In 2006 he covered his studio floor with milky-white foil to create a “floating ground,” a “floor for sculpture that is adequate for our time”. From his idea of a flowing and fleeting world, he finally turned his attention to clouds, which he began to sketch intensively in 2008.

Like a sculptor, he wanted to capture the shape of the flowing, indefinable and ephemeral cloud formations. But what he had just seen was soon gone and he continued to draw from memory, directing his gaze more and more inward. In this way, Löffelhardt shifts focus from the external appearance of the flow to the inner world to the ever-changing sensations, emotions, and flowing thoughts. In the intuitive drawing process, Stefan Löffelhardt seeks to explore inner landscapes in order to find something in the ancient memory of the soul that connects us.

Stefan Löffelhardt describes his working process as follows: “Somewhere on the page, I begin with what may be a crimson pencil to draw fine lines as traces over the empty surface. I do not follow a plan, but only an inner impulse. There are growing compactions that I trace with the pencil, red and brown shades are added, the emerging areas evolve into cobalt blue, chrome green, into orange. Veins form, connections, complex systems of structures… Maybe this is how clouds grow and dissolve? I mean the inner ones. – These explorations give rise to new formations that I could not have imagined before.”

Natalie Geerlings

In the meantime, the development of intuitive drawings has proceeded. Out of the large complex forms – Stefan Löffelhardt calls these “lumps”- on each sheet, now evolve more and more rows of smaller lumps, which seem to float along horizontal lines in the pictorial space, a kind of scripture, that is intuitively written and also should be read solely intuitive. The lumps could be seen as individuals, which are delicately and each distinctly drawn out. Taken together, on the sheet they result in a complex structure, whose individual elements stand in a carefully coordinated network of relationships.
There is no strict rule, everything is intuition.
The artist: “…the spaces in between are important. They should be aerial. Just like the lumps, they should have a shape, not hermetically closed, but open and flowing.”

Addition of the artist, 2022