In a Forbidden Moment - Gallery Selection

Exhibition Overview

In a Forbidden Moment - Gallery Makowski, Chelsea, New York 555 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 On view until December 3, 2025

The five works presented in this selection approach the human body as a site of psychological truth. Rather than depicting emotion through facial expression or dramatic narrative, the paintings focus on micro-gestures - the subtle, involuntary movements of the hands, the slight tilt of a head, the moment when a body reveals more than it intends. The works originate in a unique process: before painting, short internalized performances are filmed in the studio. Instead of directing models toward a specific emotion, they are guided toward a stored inner tension - an unresolved conflict that briefly becomes visible and then disappears again. This fleeting psychological opening becomes the foundation of each painting. The result is a figurative practice concerned less with theatricality and more with fragile thresholds: between thought and movement, control and release, concealment and involuntary revelation. Hands play a central role. They are not accessories or expressive additions - they are the primary carriers of psychological charge. Their positioning, tension, and restraint structure the entire image. Sometimes they shelter; sometimes they resist; sometimes they reveal a conflict the body cannot articulate verbally. Although the paintings contain no landscapes and do not reference classical Romantic motifs, they carry a neo-romantic atmosphere -not through setting, but through sensibility. The inwardness, suspended emotional states, and attention to vulnerability align the work with a broader contemporary return to intimate, psychological figuration.

Artist Statement

In my pursuit of underlying realities, I expand my intellectual framework through mythology, philosophy, and systemic psychology. Psychological tension is the central driving motif, exploring dynamics between individuals, within groups, and internally. These tensions function as a fundamental compositional element in my images, bridging both thematic content and formal structure. Before painting, I played double bass. Eventually, sound became too fleeting, too formless. Painting allows me to give lasting shape to the intangible - to make the unspeakable visible and to find stillness in it.

Press & Features

• Realism Today - Feature: In a Forbidden Moment ↗
• Beautiful Bizarre Magazine - Emerging Artist Selection ↗
• CREATE! Magazine - Cover Feature & Interview (Issue 53) ⤓
• Divide Magazine - Feature (Issue 15) ↗
• Aesthetica Artist Directory - December/January Issue

Neo-Romanticism and the Age of Digital Disembodiment

We are living in a neo-romantic era. Much like in the early 19th century, our present moment is shaped by a deep disillusionment with the promises of reason, progress, and political ideals. What once seemed to offer liberation - Enlightenment, democracy, digital connectivity - now often leads to fragmentation, exhaustion, and alienation. In response, many people turn inward, searching for identity, meaning, and emotional depth. The first Romantic movement arose from a similar collective disillusion. The ideals of the Enlightenment were undermined by war, turmoil, and shifting power structures. Artists and thinkers began questioning classical ideals of harmony and rationality, rediscovering the Middle Ages not as historical truth but as a dreamscape of spirituality, authenticity, and symbolic intensity. Today, in a world overwhelmed by information and algorithmic influence, emotion, myth, and inner experience return powerfully to the foreground. Periods of isolation intensified our sensitivity to micro-gestures, vulnerability, and physical presence. As a counter-movement to digital detachment, the body re-emerges as a site of emotional truth in a hyperconnected yet emotionally distant world.

Contact

Website: kurtstimmeder.at Email: office@kurtstimmeder.at Instagram: @kurtstimmeder