Pia Stadtbäumer – “Cat’s out!” 2023

Lutfridstraße 12, 53121 Bonn

artandliving #17

Project description of the wall design in the stairwell of Lutfridstraße 12 by the artist Pia Stadtbäumer:

For the year 2023, we have chosen the artist Pia Stadtbäumer who has chosen the staircase in Lutfridstraße 12 to display her colorful murals “Cat’s out” to be installed as an addendum for 2023. The artistic work was completed in late summer 2024.

When Pia Stadtbäumer began studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the early 1980s, the figurative was almost a silent desire – alongside the important discourse of conceptual art, the "Neue Wilden" (New Wild Artists) were reclaiming expressive painting with a garish gesture. But something was also stirring beyond these currents: a new perspective on the body, as a bearer of history, as a measure of perception, as a site of resistance. Artists such as Kiki Smith, Robert Gober, Stephan Balkenhol, and Martin Honert embraced this – and Pia Stadtbäumer did it in her own way.

Her early sculptures—corporeal fragments, bathed in vibrant colors, formed from materials such as wax, paper, or felt—seemed as if they came from an in-between world. In 1990, as part of the Peter Mertes Fellowship, the Bonner Kunstverein exhibited these modeled, oversized blue arms, which seemed simultaneously alien and familiar. Further grants followed, including the Schmidt-Rottluff Fellowship and the Kunstfonds—recognitions that also serve as milestones. Since 2000, she has taught as a professor at the HFBK Hamburg—a sculptor who reimagines spaces and re-examines the bodies within them.

Stadtbäumer's works are idiosyncratic phenomena: they seem close to the familiar yet simultaneously elude it. Realistically modeled, yet with unsettling proportions—oversized or fragmented, made of wax or felt—limbs hang from the ceiling, bodies tip out of alignment, expectations shift. Her sculptures tease the familiar until it tips: into wonder, into strangeness, into questioning. She opens up, refracts, elaborates, and translates the classical sculptural element—the body, the fragment, the material—into the present. Just as Giacometti once inscribed a new temporality on the human figure, Stadtbäumer develops a unique language for the 21st century.

Pia Stadtbäumer also knows how to anchor her stories in the interior. For the series artandliving MIWO, she transformed the staircase at Lutfridstraße 12 into a fabulous setting. Cat's Out! A silent story unfolds, evoking an entire cosmos in a few, comic-like, pointed characters and strong areas of color.

A cat sneaks up the stairs. Tip, tap, tip, tap Only their paw prints betray them: black on yellow, from the entrance to the raised ground floor. Then: a deep midnight blue. Two enormous cat eyes glow from the wall. One floor further: a cat's snout with whiskers like threads stretching into the unknown. Bird tracks follow, ascending: first white on blue, then black on yellow. Step by step – until at the top, only the cat's tail disappears into the wall.

Thus, everyone who enters this building becomes part of the narrative. The walk through the stairwell suddenly becomes a choreography, a search for clues, a small stage. With just a few, carefully placed symbols, Pia Stadtbäumer succeeds in transforming a space into a story without a beginning or an end. A story that remains in motion – like her sculptures themselves.

Text: Beate Eckstein / Pia Stadtbäumer

Photographer: (Mareike Tocha, Cologne)