Collector’s Choice: Reinhard Stammer
“The bold works of Reinhard Stammer seem to form a direct stream from his subconscious mind to the canvas surface, assaulting the viewer with the vinegar of turbulent agony and sweet recollections all at once. Many lifetimes of experience and exploration seem poured out into color, line and shape.
Declarations made through textures and emerging shapes require from the viewer the willingness to quietly and slowly decode a multitude of symbols through contemplation, free association and complete immersion in the painterly surface.”

Written by Janis Kirstein

Art Historian Dr. Vöhringer has said: “Reinhard Stammer is, in the best sense of the word, an autodidact.”
The term goes back to the philosophers, aphorisms, writers and poets of Lichtenberg. And it’s good that
there are the self-taught in art, he continues and he calls as an example the painting customs officer
Henri Rousseau.
The well known art critic Uwe Lempelius has said in reference to the work of Mr Stammer, “The fact that art is studied, is no guarantee of the quality of the painted works of art. Only the way that you paint the art is the final guarantee. And this, he says distinguishes the difference between being an artist and being another kind of professional. There are no autodidactic doctors or lawyers, he adds.
“But I know several artists without education who are members of the Federation of Artists. Just think of
the naive customs officer Henri Rousseau whose naive art Picasso once discovered.”
“Yes, now I have included Stammer with these big artists,” Lempelius says. “ Mr.Stammer has given rise to
a whole series of paintings, where if the viewer discovered these works in a museum as an exhibit, he
could not determine if the artist was an amateur.”
Reinhard Stammer was born on 25/07/1952 in Glücksburg on the Baltic Sea.
He says of painting : “The joy of painting, has been with me since I was in the cradle.”
He finds it interesting that symbols found in his pictures from his early youth have re-emerged in his
later works as well.
He says that he studied life with all its ups and downs, with its light – and dark sides. “ I lived my life
passionately and sometimes excessively. There was no apparent plan. At age 32, I founded the
PARC-Verlag, www.parc.de .”
Stammer’s study of Buddhism and Advaita, along with his many visits to Ramesh Balsekar in Bombay
have been the source of many answers to questions he has asked since early childhood. He believes
that the non duality or as Ramesh Balsekar says: “consciousness is all there is” seems somehow to be
expressed in his paintings.

As Stammer continued to paint through the years, he increasingly lost interest in merely reproducing
the visible world. A painted flower is not an actual flower, nor a painted man an actual human, he says.
“It is color on a substrate. Nothing more and the colors and shapes call forth the viewer’s own memories.”
Looking back over his many years painting, Stammer evaluates his paintings by saying, “In 30 years, not
very many paintings emerged, but some were particularly beautiful and interesting pictures.”
During this time, he also wrote poems and also a chronicle, which originated in this period.
He also attributes his ability to compensate severe calamities that struck him at the age of 52 years
with his act of painting. He says of painting, “She saved my life, so I am grateful for this gift that enabled me
some to give something through my pictures.”
I would like to give special thanks to Reinhard Stammer for allowing me to feature his art work on
KIRSTEINFINEART.
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About Janis Kirstein

Janis Kirstein is an American contemporary artist and writer based in Louisville, Kentucky.
Trained in painting and mixed media, her work explores the subconscious through layered textures and symbolic abstraction.
She is the founder of Kirstein Fine Art, where she curates and writes about artists who blur the boundaries between intuition and expression