Stephan Kern (* 1955 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein) is a German visual artist.
Kern studied from 1978 to 1982 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Kern often works with materials from an industrial context that appear fragmented or alienated.
"Independent, material beings whose forms nevertheless always contain a trace of a memory of what they might once have been, without the entire context of meaning being revealed.
(...) Kern's works are (...) condensations of concepts and images that we create of reality."
His autonomous constructions from abstract forms invite association and reinterpretation.
As tangible and solid as Kern's objects made of bronze, iron, brass or aluminum appear to the viewer in their material appearance, they nevertheless remain alien and strangely remote.
In Kern's constellations - multi-part ensembles - this perception is even stronger in that the viewer cannot devote himself to a single object without considering the contrast and similarity in material, shape or surface finish to the other objects:
for his exhibition in the Rathausgalerie Munich in 2010, for example, Kern had spread out a large number of objects - at first glance randomly - in the room, mostly directly on the floor.
As in the individual object - such as cast steel rings that hang from another ring like a bunch of keys, or towers whose levels are offset from one another - Kern's cosmos is based on rigidity in the small and variability in the large.
(Source: Wikipedia)