Having worked mainly in sculpture during the past two years, Peter Stauss has now returned to painting, his original medium. His new work will be on show for the first time in a major solo exhibition at carlier | gebauer.

Peter Stauss’ paintings appear wild, animated, and at times almost chaotic. Colour splodges are warring with textures, human figures share the surface with dogs and monkeys, order gives way to uncertainty. The construction of the image does not follow the formal structure of accepted rules of visual perception. There is no foreground, dividing the surface into hierarchies and thereby attributing an illusionary “secondary” status to areas and objects in the background.

All figures in these paintings, no matter if human or animal, can be distinguished from the other surfaces and textures through the meticulously-chosen stroke of the brush which highlights facial features and body shape. They stand in contrast to the composition of the two-dimensional, far more spontaneous and rougher remainder of the painting. Carton-board, the ostensible medium, creates a solid surface that becomes part of the work as it is visible at various points. The larger-sized works are assembled from several individual pieces of carton whose organic format determines the structure of the works. The borders and edges of the carton segments are on the one hand crossed by the figures and gestures and thus partially obscured by them, yet wherever the shapes terminate at the physical edge of a piece of carton and do not continue onto the adjacent carton, they create welcome fractures that prevent the paintings from becoming too much of a homogenous ensemble.