Stefan Knauf

Stefan Knauf’s practice spans sculpture, installation, and research, exploring the aesthetic, emotional, and ideological dimensions of the ecological. 

At its core: irretrievable loss. What disappears when a landscape vanishes? What remains when nature exists only as a reconstruction? Knauf’s material language is precise: galvanized steel, bronze—materials that simultaneously represent construction and erosion. Industrial processes such as hydroforming, laser cutting, and hot-dip galvanizing produce forms that appear organic but do not preserve life. Artificial ecosystems in which nature persists only as structure and surface. His research into the history of botany, trade, and colonial expansion shows that nature has long been a cultural and political construct—every houseplant a potential artifact of displacement and violence. 

When Beginnings End  is the sharpest articulation of this stance. The upper floor of the gallery is bathed in orange light—somewhere between an incubator and a desert. Hydroformed steel agaves and saguaros stand frozen just before blooming, their promise structurally locked in place. The agave exhausts itself completely for a single bloom it will never achieve. The saguaro—an archaic symbol of endurance—has been dying unnoticed for decades, too slowly for us to pay attention. Bronze banana blossoms hang from the wall like severed organs: male buds without a counterpart, purposeless, exhausted. The modern dessert banana, stripped of its seeds, existing only as a clone—replicated billions of times, genetically impoverished, highly vulnerable. A system optimized for reproduction, destroying the very conditions of its own reproduction. The sculptures stand on islands of perlite—small enclosed gardens that structure the space like a barren landscape.

In the gallery basement, bathed in cool laboratory blue, dysfunctional sperm swim in circles under the microscope—isolated, aimless, to the point of exhaustion. The cultural notion of relentless forward movement gives way to fatigue and a narcissistic compulsive repetition.

Knauf calls for a collective culture of mourning—not as a weakness, but as resistance against repression. The work is not a memorial. It opens up a space: for what does not return, and for what this loss leaves behind.

Opening
1 May 2026
6 – 9 PM

Exhibition on view
2 May – 20 June 2026


For more information, please contact the gallery:  mail@robertgrunenberg.com