You are cordially invited to a reception with German painters Jutta Haeckel and Stefan Kürten, whose work is held in the collections of institutions including MoMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, and Kunstmuseum Bonn.
7:30 p.m. — Walk-through with Jutta, Stefan, Scott, and Todd Hosfelt, Founder of Hosfelt Gallery
Monday, 31 August, 6 – 9:30 p.m.
1881 McGaw Avenue, Irvine, CA 92614
Please RSVP by August 24.
Stefan Kürten, Blue Sky, 2009, oil and pigmented gesso on linen, 31 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches.
Stefan Kürten's forty-year painting practice centers on flowers, wallpaper-like patterns, and domestic architecture. These are idealized spaces of beauty, comfort, and safety that stand in for aspiration, hope, and childhood memory.
Hosfelt Gallery has represented Kürten since its founding in 1996. He formerly taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied under Michael Buthe, and is an alumnus of the San Francisco Art Institute.
His work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr; Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf; Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; and Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg. It is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Berkeley Art Museum; and LACMA, among others. He lives with his wife and daughter in Düsseldorf.
Jutta Haeckel, Skin in the Game, 2024, acrylic on jute (8 panels), 78 3/4 x 126 inches.
Düsseldorf-based Jutta Haeckel paints on jute — the coarse, natural fiber burlap is made from — using unorthodox techniques that push against traditional notions of painting. Most notably, she applies pigment to the reverse of the canvas, then forces it through small gaps in the fabric, extruding paint onto the front and subverting the two-dimensional space of the medium.
She treats the canvas as a permeable membrane: viscous material is forced back and forth across a porous barrier, abrading the woven substrate until it seems on the verge of unraveling, at times appearing to carry more paint than the canvas can support. The risk is central to her process — every studio decision holds the potential for either creation or collapse, and that precariousness drives the work.
Haeckel studied with Karin Kneffel and Katharina Grosse, whose contrasting approaches to painting shaped her own fascination with the medium's possibilities. As she describes it: "I don't believe that everything is already accomplished, I think evolution is always possible... I always force myself to search for the boundaries of painting and the boundaries of the materials I am working with."
