The series About Life and Death marks a turning point in Reinhard Stammer’s artistic journey. For the first time, his focus shifts consistently inward—from external forms toward the existential experience of being human.
The paintings are reduced to their essentials. Rendered in earthy greys, muted reds and deep violets, fragments of human bodies, skulls, shadows and symbols emerge like memories—traces of what fades and of what remains.
The painting process itself is both impulsive and meditative. Layers are applied, scraped away and painted over. Every work bears the visible traces of its own creation. Within this tension between vulnerability and endurance, between transience and persistence, Stammer arrives at a new existential clarity.
About Life and Death is not a series about death. It is a meditation on life itself—its fragility, its dignity and its mystery.
Several years ago, the series was exhibited in Cologne. A visitor expressed interest in buying a single painting. Stammer declined—not out of conviction, but simply because it did not feel right. Only later did he understand why.
The paintings belonged together.
They were never intended as a collection of individual works, but as stations along a single path.
The sequence follows an order that emerged unconsciously. It begins with black—the colour of the material world—and concludes in violet, the colour of infinity.
Between these poles unfolds the human journey: from the material world toward inner awakening.
Only afterwards did the artist recognize that he had intuitively created what he had never consciously planned. Within the space of two hours, he had painted not isolated images, but an existential sequence.
Its deeper meaning revealed itself only through the eyes of another.