Martin Stommel
“On Deliverance”
Martin Stommel‘s art is a statement on the turmoil of the world; a method, an attempt to find a way from the inferno to paradise. His lighting controls, the visionary compositions full of suspense and drama, their extensive diagonals and gestures, the elongated bodies of the protagonists in his paintings all lead from banality to the essential question. In his paintings the world and the ever-changing luck burst and fate roars in the eternal chant of the mystery of the universe. Herein the artists follows the fevers of Tintoretto (1518 – 1594) or Max Beckmann (1884 – 1950). The art-historical education of Martin Stommel, the brilliant artistic studies with the famous Russian dissident Boris Birger, who came as an immigrant to Bonn, the academic studies in Munich and Berlin directed him to a remarkable philosophic transfer of real visual experiences into epiphanic viewing experiences, inspiring new visual solutions. His dynamic of the pictorial scripture, his freedom of choice of colour, his visionary reinterpretation in the formal solutions are rare qualities in the international art scene.
Martin Stommel was born in 1969. From 1994 to 1997 Stommel first studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with professor Bernhard Weißhaar. In 1998 he changed to the University of Arts, Berlin (HdK) with Klaus Fußmann.
In the years 2001 to 2007 Stommel came into contact with the world of circus, resulting in a series of paintings and drawings of circus performers and scenes in the circus ring. He portrayed the most famous clowns of our time, like Oleg Popov, Francesco Caroli, David Larible or Fumagalli, cooperating especially with Berhard Paul‘s Circus Roncalli.
In 2004 Stommel was invited by Prince Rainier III to exhibit his series of circus paintings in the Principality of Monaco.
Since the 2000s the paintings of Martin Stommel have been shown in numerous exhibitions, among others in the Lehmbruck Museum, the Kallmann Museum, the Museum Charlotte Zander, the Museum of the Cathedral of Trier, the Municipal Art Gallery Bonn. Further exhibitions took place in the Théâtre Princesse Grace (Monaco), the Lew Kopelew Forum (Cologne), the Catholic Academy in Bavaria (Munich) and at the Venice Biennial (European Cultural Center).
Stommel‘s art works have been featured by several galleries on art fairs in Cologne, Karlsruhe, Berlin, Munich, Essen and Lübeck, as well as at the „Salon der Gegenwart“ in Hamburg and the London Print Fair in the Royal Academy.
Art works of Martin Stommel are in public collections (i. a. German Business Secretary, former State Guest-House Petersberg, City of Wesseling, City of Ismaning, City of Bonn) as well as in many private collections, for example Grillo (Duisburg), Slifka (New York), Klöcker (Frankfurt), Barthlott (Bonn) and Zander (Bönnigheim), German Embassy Tirana (Albania).
