The series About Life and Death marks a turning point in Reinhard Stammer’s work. For the first time, the focus is consistently directed inward—away from external forms and toward the existential themes of being human. The paintings in this series are raw and minimalist, often rendered in earthy, gray, and blood-red tones. Fragments of human bodies, skulls, shadows, and symbols appear like memories of what fades away—and at the same time, as traces of what remains. The painting style is both impulsive and meditative: paint is layered, scraped away, and painted over. Each work visibly carries the traces of its own creation process. In this tension between life and decay, between vulnerability and endurance, Stammer finds a new, existential clarity. About Life and Death is not a series about death—it is an exploration of life itself, with its fragility, its depth, and its dignity. A few years ago, he exhibited a series of paintings in Cologne—hung according to his own feeling, without thinking about a deeper order. A visitor approached him and expressed interest in purchasing a single work. However, the artist insisted on selling the series only as a complete set. The visitor then pointed out something that had escaped the artist himself until then: the series unconsciously followed a metaphysical order. It begins with black—a symbol of the material world—and ends in violet, the color of infinity. In between, the human path toward spiritual enlightenment unfolds. In that moment, the artist realized what he had created without having consciously intended it. Within two hours, he had—intuitively and beyond rational planning—captured the essence of human existence. This realization hit him like a bolt from the blue, both fascinating and disarmingly honest: the truth of his work was only revealed to him through the eyes of a stranger.