EXTRA
Stefan Marx

Eröffnung: 29. April 2026, 19:00 Uhr

Dauer: 1. Mai 2026 – 17. Mai 2026
Öffnungszeiten: Freitag – Sonntag, 13:00 – 18:00

Mit EXTRA zeigt SMAC eine Ausstellung von Stefan Marx, dessen Arbeit seit über zwanzig Jahren Zeichnung, Typografie, Musik, Künstlerbuch, Objekt und Malerei miteinander verbindet. Ausgangspunkt sind oft alltägliche Beobachtungen, Sprache, Linien und Zeichen, die sich über verschiedene Formate und Kontexte hinweg weiterentwickeln – vom Notizbuch über Drucksachen und Plattencover bis zur Leinwand.

Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt der Ausstellung liegt auf Marx’ langjähriger Arbeit für Musiklabels: Erstmals wird eine Vielzahl seiner Plattencover in einer Ausstellung zusammengeführt und als eigenständiger Teil seines künstlerischen Werks sichtbar gemacht.

Zugleich zeigt EXTRA Schriftbilder aus Marx’ seit 2019 entwickelter Serie von großformatigen Monotypien. In einem dreistufigen Verfahren entstehen jeweils drei Einzelbilder: ein positives, ein negatives und ein sogenanntes Geisterbild, der ghost. Der satte Farbauftrag, die Intensität der Pigmente und die indirekte Bildfindung über das Drucksieb eröffnen ein malerisches Experimentierfeld, in dem Schrift, Linie und Farbe aus dem Prozess des Druckens selbst hervorgehen.

EXTRA verbindet Marx’ Arbeit an visuellen Sprachen mit der Monotypie als offenem Feld für Verdichtung, Wiederholung und Abweichung – und zeigt, wie eng Musik, Bild und Sprache in seiner Praxis miteinander verbunden sind.

_________________________

Stefan Marx

EXTRA at SMAC, Berlin

01.05.26-17.05.26

1

It was late, or early.

The music went on, indifferent to the hour. Fog gathered on the shop windows, where a few drawings of planes recalled aircraft waiting on a tarmac. The old sofa, almost buried beneath a pile of jackets, still held the warmth of those who had just been there. In the dim light, the space was filled with images. Records leaned against the walls, stickers covered the racks, and flyers lay scattered across the room. The same language appeared on covers and posters, in printed matter, and on objects of all kinds: black-and-white typography, broken sentences, words as images, lines, forms, and vivid compositions of color. All of Smallville Records’s visuals have been made by a single hand. The artist’s work moves across mediums without hierarchy, lines returning from one surface to another, holding everything in relation.

Eventually, the sound would end, and people would drift away. Records would slip back into their sleeves. The shop would open, and customers would arrive. Yet for a while, everything held in suspension, with no clear line between what was made and what was lived. Music, art, life, all at once. It was that freedom that drew us, without knowing where it might lead.

2

Twenty years on, Smallville Records continues, its visuals still made by Stefan Marx. Extending to other labels, more than one hundred and fifty covers now circulate across more than one hundred thousand records worldwide, passing from hand to hand, from record stores and domestic spaces to museum collections.

Marx’s body of work moves from one form to another, altering only the conditions of its encounter. It often begins on the page of a pocket-size notebook as a drawing or sentence, in a quick, fine black line, inspired by a daily encounter, a book, a song. It might then return as a monotype or an oil painting on canvas, small or large in scale, shown in a gallery or museum. Elsewhere, it may settle on the curved surface of a porcelain vase, turn into a fabric pattern, travel through mail art letters, or take the form of a typeface drawn from Marx’s handwriting. It might also slip into the pages of one of his artist’s books, of which there are more than one hundred and ten, Xeroxed and stapled or bound in hardcover, appearing on tables at art book fairs or in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Each of these gestures carries equal weight and reflects Marx’s sharp understanding of the expanded field of art. This movement across mediums and forms of circulation situates his practice within a longer history. Over the past century, artists have repeatedly sought to challenge the divisions between art and craft, the popular and the canonical, forging new relationships between artistic languages and techniques of serial production and distribution. From early modern art and the Bauhaus to early contemporary practices, Pop Art, the Pictures Generation, and conceptual art, among others, such approaches have continuously worked to unsettle these distinctions. Again and again, the question returns: who is art for, and how is it encountered?

3

We may need to rewind several decades, to Marx’s upbringing, to understand how central these questions are to his work. The artist grows up in a timber-framed house that had sheltered many generations, in a village of five hundred inhabitants, in Todenhausen, in northern Hessen. Surrounded by forests and animals, by landscapes recalling the stillness and beauty of nineteenth-century paintings, there are no museums, no galleries, no art shops in sight.

At regular intervals, the nearest town would suddenly awaken. A cohort of international artists and audiences would flood in for Documenta, turning Kassel into a vibrant center of contemporary art for a few months. From a school trip at thirteen to a hundred-day pass bought with saved pocket money at eighteen, it opened onto a world far removed from everyday life at home. In the years between, Marx’s relation to art took shape elsewhere, through album covers, song lyrics, video clips, skate culture, posters, and zines, through images and VHS tapes passed between friends.

These formative experiences remain inseparable, continuing to inform Marx’s body of work. They appear in the artist’s attention to contemporary practices and in his proximity to popular culture. The work moves across contexts, encountered in a small village as much as in the world’s great metropolises, without ever seeming out of place. Bringing together his approach to Smallville as a Gesamtkunstwerk and his use of monotype as a field of experimentation on canvas, EXTRA traces a practice attentive to its point of departure, and always open to what might take shape next, in form, in thought, and in context.

– Liberty Adrien