Grid and Gestures: Stella Pfeiffer in Her New York Studio

When I visited Stella Pfeiffer’s studio, I was struck by how she inhabited her workspace as a person and an artist. She didn’t just create art; she truly made the space an extension of herself. Pfeifer, an artist-in-residence at Kunstraum, saw the studio’s sober, industrial style—marked by white walls and exposed ceiling pipes—as an invitation to intervene in the space. She employed colored adhesive tapes to craft compositions that interacted with the architecture. For instance, she used black adhesive tape on the floor to create depth by simulating the ceiling structures, while blue and red adhesive tapes corresponded to the ceiling grid. Through improvisational movements that spanned from one edge to the other, Pfeiffer created these spatial drawings, resulting in a unique installation.

Pfeiffer’s work integrates the corporeality she has explored through performance, using multicolored tapes and found materials to reflect her immersive experiences in New York City, where she spent five transformative months as an artist-in-residence. By focusing on conceptual installations and drawings, Pfeiffer discusses her creative process, her work’s symbolism, and the urban environment’s profound influence on her art. In this conversation, we learn about the dynamic world of Stella Pfeiffer, whose recent works are featured in the exhibition Minimal/Maximal – The Principle of Convergence at Lichtundfire Gallery, curated by Priska Juschka.

EHV: You have spent five months in New York. Can you share your experience as an artist during this time and how it has influenced your work?

SP: This is my first time in New York City. Therefore, the starting point of my current work is the city itself, as my ‘Open Studio.’ I immersed myself in the city during the first month of my five-month stay, intending to develop new work. In a broader context, the new work resulted from a large-scale performative process. The material I worked with: coffee sleeves and colored adhesive tapes, were found in the city.

These materials and the resulting working methods reflect my experiences which I realized formally in different visual languages. These include figurative, abstract-surrealistic-naive drawings of city views, The City no 1, The City no 2, on the coffee sleeves and abstract-conceptual-minimalistic tape drawings on cardboard, Tape No 1-10. These were integrated into two room-filling conceptual wall-floor-drawings in my studio at Kunstraum, Space Tape no 1//1 and Space Tape no 2//1. I transformed the two installation-drawings into a new form, creating two specific spheres: Sphere no 1//1 and Sphere 2//1, in which the potential of the former drawings is still present.

EHV: Your work often seems to balance the containment of space with the freedom for viewers to reflect from various perspectives. How do you achieve this balance in your installations, and how does this approach correlate with your smaller works?

SP: Both the drawings and the installations create new abstract, immersive spaces for perceptive experiences and reflections. In my work, contrasting positioning, layering, overlapping, and intersections of diverse forms and lines, along with the emptiness between them, evoke an immersive, illusionistic three-dimensional without relying on geometrical perspective. This can occur on a small piece of paper or the walls and floor of my studio at Kunstraum in NYC during my artist residency. The two-dimensional drawing transforms into a room-filling installation. In my room-filling installations Black Momentum, Space (2023) and Drawing Circles –Constellation No 1 (2021), I used specific paper panels to integrate into the architectural space, creating new architectures within the existing ones. The new and surrounding architectures are mutually dependent, yet the possibilities for creating new spaces are countless.

In the installations, I focus on exploring the fields of tension between the installation, the surrounding architecture and the viewer. In small-format drawings, I explore the fields of tension within the illusionistic three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface from the viewer’s perspective.

Achieving a balance between space and the viewers’ freedom to reflect from various perspectives is difficult to articulate. Artistic work emerges from an intuitive creation flow combined with critical observation, reflection and evaluation. I have extensive experience and knowledge in working with space. Formal aspects are important: the sign, symbol, mark in space in relation to the emptiness. Space is defined by its emptiness in both drawings and installations.

EHV: Your work Tapes No. 10 from the series Tapes (2024) is featured in the exhibition Minimal/Maximal at Lichtundfire Gallery curated by Priska Juschka. Can you discuss this work and how it reflects your experiences in New York?

SP: Until now, I have mainly worked with black and white. In the Tapes series, I expanded the color spectrum with multicolored tapes. This inexpensive material has a trashy character enhanced by its brilliant color creating a stark contrast between the low and high.

Conceptual work is becoming increasingly important in my process. Drawing with tapes allowed me to develop my previous conceptual drawings into a new visual form. No sketches or studies were made for these works. The concept is the idea itself. The development of each piece is a spontaneous, associative experimentation and exploration of translating my personal experiences of NYC into colorful, layered lines that create abstract, colorful spaces with a three-dimensional illusion, approaching the feel of painting. The layering of tapes introduces additional edges and color nuances intensifying the spatial depth through contrasts.

Tape no 10 presents a strong abstract grid of black layered and crossing lines that form a larger black shape near the center. Small colored fragments glow like colored glass splinters between the black covering the entire picture space. These two contrasting architectures are in constant motion. The gaze wanders and glides back and forth as space emerges and dissolves expanding the pictorial space.

NYC is characterized by grids and systems of order and orientation, such as the arrangement of housing blocks, streets, parks and subway lines, which contrast with the hustle and bustle of pedestrians, traffic and the vibrancy of a multicultural society. Tape No 10 is an abstract translation of my experiences.

EHV: The circle plays a significant role in your work. Can you elaborate on the symbolism of the circle and how viewers have reacted to the layering of multiple circles in your installation Drawing Circles – Constellation No 1 (2023).

SP: I develop my work organically, with new aspects attracting my interest and evoking new questions that I want to explore. This specific room installation is a further development of the series Encircling Stones (2016-2021), where I encircled stones in various ways on small-format paper. I became interested in the circle as a uniform movement that expresses individual, idiosyncratic, and expressive gestures. The differences between the circles and the random blotches evoke the diverse patterns of movement on the large paper panels. Each time, the perfection of the circle, one of the most original signs and symbols in human history, was questioned anew. I became curious about what would happen if I filled an entire room with these flexible elements. A baroque, immersive physical space with new patterns and forms was created using a minimalistic sign in a repetitive way, allowing visitors to immerse themselves. The extreme dynamic could also pass physical limits.

Despite the enormous dynamics, contemplation was an important aspect of this artificial space. Only with time could forms and patterns be seen, and the space and associated experiences began to open up to the viewer.

The intense movement required its opposite–concentrated stillness. A huge Black Circle No 1 (2021), was integrated as a central mark of the rest, questioning itself through its motion and implying questions within the space.

The installation in the large room was contrasted with an installation in a smaller, more intimate space, where a smaller piece, Black Circle, No 2 (2021), could be experienced in a contemplative, meditative, and recovering silence. This smaller circle spoke to the dimensions of existence similar to the room-filling one, but this time concentrated in a single circle.

The room-drawing challenged the perception, stimulating viewers’ fantasy and imagination, while becoming a space for existential reflections. The immersion posed a major challenge for some, but others experienced history, infinity, spiritual dimensions, organic structures and many other personal interpretations.

EHV: Performance is at the core of your artistic practice. How has your experience as a performance artist influenced your transition to creating two-dimensional, sculptural, and spatial installation works? Can you share an example where this shift in methodology led to an unexpected or particularly striking outcome?

SP: Drawing is the core of my artistic practice. I have been drawing since I was a child. During my studies in fine arts, I discovered Performance Art and realized that working with my body was an important aspect of my artistic practice. Consequently, I focused on it for nearly a decade. But drawing has always remained central to my art.

For me, as an artist, art –and especially drawing– is a way of thinking and perceiving the physical world and the space beyond it. Through my mostly abstract drawings, I explore the idea of performance and the space where I would perform. The process of drawing opens up “the space beyond the space,” allowing me to encapsulate it and transform it in a new way during the process of the performance, making it tangible for viewers. This creates a new space through art where universal aspects of life, such as the essence of existence, history, memory etc. can be experienced individually, based on a physical perceptive experience. This process involves constantly changing perception of the visual realities created during the performance.

In my artistic development, I reached a point where working with performance art was no longer coherent for me, leading me to refocus on drawing. However, the process-oriented, spontaneous, associative, experimental, performative way of working based on physics remains important to my practice.

EHV: Black Momentum (2023) is an installation that occupies space in a way that leaves just enough room for the viewer to navigate and observe, effectively making the observer a part of the artwork and even engaging them in a performative manner. How did the public respond to this immersive experience?

SP: In recent years, I’ve explored large-scale, site-specific drawings and object installations, returning to my roots as a performance artist by using three-dimensional space. My research focuses on perception as a dynamic process, constantly reshaping reality through relationships of tension and power. The interplay between space, time, and viewers is fluid, necessitating continuous questioning.

In our fast-paced, digital world, we lose resonance with ourselves and our environment. My work aims to counteract this by creating spaces where changing realities can be experienced. These immersive installations, made of minimalistic, repetitive elements, require time and engagement, confronting viewers with themselves. There was a wide range of reactions from viewers. The major challenge was the confrontation with black as a color and being surrounded by it. For some, it was too strong, and they couldn’t enter or leave the space very quickly. For others, it was an overwhelming, new, inspiring, personal experience of history, infinity, spiritual dimensions, infinite silence, peace, death, grief and many other personal images and interpretations.

Stella Pfeifer was included in the group show MINIMAL | MAXIMAL – The Principle of Convergence at Lichtundfire Gallery from June 27 to July 27, 2024.

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