Artists: Richard Stipl, Edvard Munch

The encounter between Edvard Munch and Richard Stipl proposed by the exhibition Take My Shadow Give Me Love at Steinhauser Gallery is grounded in a shared understanding of the human figure as a site where existential tension, emotional intensity, and symbolic resonance converge. Although separated by more than a century, what links the Norwegian modernist and the contemporary Czech artist is not influence in a linear sense, but a deeper attunement to the past as a living reservoir: a realm of images, gestures, and metaphors through which the crises and aspirations of the present can be articulated.

While Munch’s work has long been interpreted through psychological expressionism, the exhibition also touches on a broader cultural lineage in which pre-modern and Gothic aesthetics – marked by emotional intensity and stark depictions of love, suffering, and mortality – open up additional possibilities for interpreting his imagery and its existential concerns. This framework highlights compelling parallels with Stipl’s artistic practice, in which the fragmented, obscured, and ritualized human figure becomes a threshold between the material and the immaterial, the temporal and the timeless.

Although Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is often interpreted through the lens modern psychology, trauma, and Symbolist introspection, his position in art history is also tied to an intensified artistic interest at the (…)

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Artists: Geneviève Capitanio, Roland Flexner, Martin Gerboc, Ádám Horváth, Adrián Klájó, Eszter Metzing, Mihael Milunović, China Moya, Jina Park, Léopold Rabus, Richard Stipl, Sándor Szász

Life unfolds as in a shadow theatre of the soul, the spirit, and the perception of what was, what is, and what could be. In a world determined by visibility, speed, and surfaces, the question of light and darkness has been around for thousands of years – or even longer. What is the meaning of radiance, brightness, luminosity, or enlightenment – and what of their absence: darkness, twilight, dimming? This question resounds within the silence of its own contemplation. Light is not just the visible, the illuminating; it is also the moment of clarity, the spark emerging from the encounter with darkness. The absence of radiance, the veil of darkness, the realm of shadows into which we fall when everything seems tangible, marks not an end but rather the origin of a deeper seeing. It is precisely in times of inner or outer darkness that the creative power that arises from suffering, uncertainty or despair unfolds. The experience of the night invites reflection and self-encounter, opening up a space in which the inner glow becomes visible in a new dimension.

Here, obscurity is not merely the absence of rays of light, but a presence of its own. In alchemical traditions, the Nigredo, the “black phase,” marks the prerequisite for every transmutation – the seemingly dead becomes the source of the new. Visions, dreams, and the engagement with archetypal shadow images show that darkness and twilight boast a creative reservoir allowing for psychological depth and aesthetic innovation. It is both a medium and a trigger, challenging the observer to engage, reflect and perceive. Every act of observation thus becomes a moment of creation, an entry into a world of its own, in which light, shadow and form are not granted. (…)

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