Stanislaus Medan has been building a world for three decades. It began in childhood, and it has not stopped. The same figures keep returning — creatures, beings, and people whose names you do not know but whose faces you begin to recognize. They inhabit dense scenes crowded with incident, and they appear again, close up, in large paintings where a single exchange fills the canvas. They carry objects. They play instruments. They press against each other. They look at one another with expressions that remain unresolved.
This is a world preoccupied with what happens between bodies — with desire, tenderness, absurdity, and the small catastrophes of social life. Its humor is specific and not entirely kind. Its intimate moments are never private.
Medan was born in Graz in 1988 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Gunter Damisch and Heimo Zobernig. Further influences are Florine Stettheimer, Janosch, Winsor McCay, Quentin Blake, Nicole Eisenman, Andrea Mantegna, Piero de la Francesca, Philip Guston, David Lynch, Amy Silman, Saul Steinberg, Abbey Lincoln, Tom Waits and many others. His two artist's books — Grexit Spomponadltüftler Nr. 1!, (self-published, 2014) and Die Hochdruckskulptur (diploma work, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2016) — are among the central documents of this world.
He lives and works in Vienna.