"Portrait #3" Drawing

STEFAN ZÉPHYR TESKE

Stefan Teske lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin, graduating as a Meisterschüler. Placements with Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood in London shaped his early practice. Today he works as a draughtsman, designer, sculptor and lecturer. His interdisciplinary work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad.

Artist Statement

The body is my central subject: as a sensual event, an erotic narrative, an intimate moment.
Years of working with fashion, construction and pattern cutting have shown me how strongly people are defined by systems and conventions: the body by measurements and norms, life by templates that are rarely questioned. Drawing is my counterpoint, a space where only the gaze, the naked body, the posture and a single moment matter.

I am an observer of people. On the subway, in the street, in cafés, I watch. Drawing gives me something precious: a legitimate reason to look longer. Deeper. More closely. In the studio, in front of a live model, I am allowed to see what otherwise remains hidden: how a body occupies space. Vulnerability. Dignity. Eroticism. Liberation. In doing so, I move between two poles: voyeur and exhibitionist. I observe while at the same time revealing something of myself: my perception, my fascination, an erotic attention towards what is in front of me.

My drawings emerge from a visual world beyond gloss and academic perfection, a world in which the grotesque is beautiful, the unfinished honest, the sensual present. Bodies with weight, with character, with what they have lived through. I celebrate bodies in their diversity, with structure, imperfection and an aesthetic that always remains bound to the moment.