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Biography
Karl Stengel was born in 1925 in Hungary. He studied art in Budapest, where he trained in painting and drawing and also received an introduction to the principles of set design and architecture, the influence of which can be seen in his current artistic style. After 1956, he studied for a period at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and subsequently taught at the Pädogogische Hochschule at Munich University. He also lived in Spain, where he was able to dedicate himself totally to painting before then moving to Italy.
Recently, Stengel created a series of drawings for the Italian Institute of Culture in Germany that were dedicated to Boccaccio’s Decameron and to Frammenti by Giuseppe Ungaretti, and of late, the artist has also conceived a series of pastel drawings that are homage to Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Tristano muore. Stengel has exhibited his works worldwide in solo and collective shows; his personal exhibitions have been hosted throughout Italy most recently in the Salone Donatello in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence and then at the George Toparcenau Cultural Centre in Curtea de Arges, Romania.
Statement
More than anything, Stengel’s works should be interpreted as attempted answers to the question of whether painting today can encompass human experience and be able to address life in all its absurdity, complexity, and tragedy. (James Wyckoff) (New York Art Magazine - ed. March 2010)
Karl Stengel is a man who has lived through the entire twentieth century with ‘avant-garde’ pride and this inflames his paintings as if he were still a twenty-year old. The surreal and metaphysical figures are made up of dreams and irony and they populate his drawings as statues sometimes as still as silhouettes or shadows, sometimes gesticulating in their anatomical deformations. In his latest production, the surreal smaller size representations on paper, have a markedly European ancestry, in particular German Expressionism and the coagulating shades of red, blue and green seemingly come out of the dynamism of expressionist brushwork, to create a symbolic bridge between abstraction and figuration, that are inextricably fused.
(Giampaolo Trotta 2011 catalog for the solo show held at the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence Italy)
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