Stefan von Reiswitz received three influences during the years of his childhood and adolescence which, to a certain extent, would be responsible for some of the main features of his later artistic orientation:

His father’s continued dedication to archaeology and the study of ancient civilisations, the strange electrical machinery in the factory owned by his mother’s family and the hobby of one of his maternal aunts of painting squares on glass, in the style of the popular paintings on glass made in Bavaria in the 18th century.

In 1946, at the age of just 15, his first glass paintings were sold in a gallery in Traunstein, and in the following years, in addition to enthusiastically reading Goethe, the German Romantic writers and Stefan Zweig in the extensive family library, he also had the opportunity to become acquainted with the German culture, Thanks to the cultural milieu in which he grew up, he had the opportunity to meet the historian and essayist Albert Schweitzer, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the pianist Walter Gieseking and the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and to develop his aesthetic preferences for Gromaire, Marc, Van Gogh and Kokoschka.

Travelling and Settlement

In 1952 he left Germany with his mother and moved to Paris, where he met and received brief lessons from André Lhote and Fernand Léger, and showed a predilection for Vlaminck and Dufy. Subsequently, he went to the French Basque Country, San Sebastián, Santillana del Mar, where he visited the Altamira cave, and Madrid, where he met Carlos Sáenz de Tejada, took a few painting lessons from Daniel Vázquez Díaz and admired Goya in the Prado Museum above all others.

After a short stay in the Cadiz village of Arcos de la Frontera, in 1955 he settled in the province of Malaga, initially in Marbella, where in August 1956 he held his first exhibition in the Casino (together with the naïf painter of Avila origin Marina Barbado, whom he had met in Madrid and who became his wife in 1962), and from 1957 in the capital of the Costa del Sol, where he exhibited for the first time, also together with Marina Barbado, at the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País in March of that year.

In March 1958, once he had joined the so-called Picasso Group2 and after taking up engraving with his friend the painter Jorge Lindell Díaz, he held his first individual exhibition at the Delegation of the Ministry of Information and Tourism in Malaga, still with works in a costumbrista style, although by then the more experimental period of his work had already begun, characterised by simultaneous investigations and explorations of abstract language, naturalistic figuration, matter painting, informalism and collage, in which the influence of Baumeister, Burri, Tàpies, Millares, Pancho Cossío and the eroded landscapes of the island of Lanzarote can be perceived.

Artistic maturity: achievement of an iconography and the beginning of work on glass. This phase, which can be considered to have ended around 1963, was followed by another, which became consolidated between 1964-1965, characterised by the appearance of an original iconographic repertoire composed of an unusual animal and human fauna and the habitual use, from then onwards, of the technique of painting on glass. At one and the same time neo-expressionist and surreal, these compositions can be interpreted both dramatically and humorously, or rather, as the sum of both states of mind, for if anything begins to stand out in Stefan’s work at that time, it is that rare combination of tragic fatality and ironic detachment from reality, between disturbing foreboding and an intelligent sense of humour, between the organic and the machinic, between what is animated by the breath of life and what is artificially created in the manner of an impossible and crazy mechanical contraption. Another very important novelty is the creation of a third dimension in the paintings, as a width of several centimetres is what this narrow intermediate space between the translucent painted surface and the wooden support that holds the whole structure at the back, a hollow in which the painter arranges a strange world of tiny objects, gold and silver paper, collages and all kinds of things, whose vision through the glass provides that reminiscence between mysterious and remote, impossible to achieve with colours alone.

If there is one feature in Stefan’s work that links directly with historical Dadaism, it is the incorporation of insignificant things and waste products into his paintings, leaving the things that are added to the composition as they are, without any ennobling modifications, in their solid and palpable three-dimensionality; links, therefore, that are more methodical and procedural, technical in the construction of the object, than spiritual or philosophical. As for his relationship with Surrealism, an “omnipotence of psychic reality” does not seem to emerge from his work, nor an acceptance of the dream as the primary instrument for understanding reality, although there is a certain proximity to that aspect of the Surrealist notion of the object that refers to the gathering of pieces and elements from different contexts, and whose only difference, according to Breton, with “the things around us” is “the mere mutation of roles”.

Technical variety

In addition to his work painted on glass and plexiglass – whose last stylistic renewal, produced around 1981-82, is distinguished by the fact that the tones begin to lighten and soften, the pigments are often applied quite diluted, the atmospheres become more breathable and the spaces of the paintings more open – Stefan has also been interested in engraving (founding member, together with Jorge Lindell Diaz and Robert McDonald, of the workshop-cooperative El Pesebre in 1970; founding member of the Colectivo Palmo in Málaga; organiser of important international graphic art exhibitions between 1969-1974, with works by, among others, Wunderlich, Meckseper, Hundertwasser, Küchenmeister and Janssen), collage as an autonomous technique and procedure (perhaps the most genuinely surrealist chapter of his entire production, epitome of his boundless admiration for Max Ernst), wire drawing (two-dimensional figures made with copper wire and glued to thick paper) and manipulated photography.

Manipulated photography consists of retouching and altering newspaper and magazine photographs with stains of paint in such a way that the image, often referring to a serious and respectable subject, acquires an ironic, satirical or humorous connotation.

The sculpture

The other major area of Stefan’s artistic activity is sculpture, which he began in the second half of the 1950s, but became a systematic dedication since 1986, during a stay of several months at Villa Massimo, the seat of the German Academy in Rome.

Enthusiast of medieval German and Flemish carvings, of Marino Marini, Lothar Fischer, Luginbühl and Tinguely, of all the techniques employed, sculpture – whose predominant iconographic themes are male and female centaurs, minotaurs, busts, mermaids and metamorphosed animals – is undoubtedly the one where we can most visibly perceive the ancestry and influence of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean in his work, an inexhaustible sphere of civilisation traversed in all directions by this tireless traveller Stefan von Reiswitz, whose entire production can be said to constitute a fruitful alliance between the contingency of reality and the delusions of the imagination, between the courageous formal rupture of the avant-garde and the unfading beauty of the classical Greco-Latin past.

An example of his sculptures could be seen in the galleries of the Picasso Foundation in Malaga. Subsequently a monumental work (2.4 metres high) has been installed in the Parque del Oeste in Malaga, entitled the pacifist, in bronze, with references to the classical Greco-Latin past.