FRANZ STEIN
SUNLIT LOVE

KÖNIG TELEGRAPHENAMT
MONBIJOUSTRASSE 13, 10117 BERLIN

25 JULY – 31 AUGUST 2025

OPENING
24 JULY 2025 | 6 – 8 PM

KÖNIG TELEGRAPHENAMT presents SUNLIT LOVE by Franz Stein, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.

SUNLIT LOVE...or, from spatial image to pictorial space.

A curious scene—A huge carpet lies on the floor of the gallery, filling the space, almost monumental. The carpet can be read like a map: the eye traverses various levels and terrains with gentle hills and shallow lakes—a small walk through the boundlessness of one's own imagination.

A carpet, the work of a painter?! In recent years, Franz Stein’s canvases have become light, airy—even playful: There are no preliminary sketches or templates. On a layered white base, beneath which thinned layers of acrylic paint shimmer through, the artist swiftly applies color in lines or areas—gestures of powerful energy and intense dynamics. Thus, what initially appears flat becomes, upon longer viewing, a spatial image with foreground, middle, and background. These are worlds cast onto canvas—of thoughts, dreams, and desires: images of spaces and realities, painted utopias! Pure joy in painting, in the act of painting. The indulgent handling of the canvas is inherent in every one of Franz Stein’s works.

And now this: the leap from the wall to the floor, from the two-dimensionality of the surface to the three-dimensionality of space, from the formal to the fluffy! Franz Stein designed the 55-square-meter carpet at a 1:20 scale as a draft sketch composed of 21 individual parts. These carpet segments are arranged in such a way that each can function autonomously as a portrait-format rug, yet together they form a landscape-format overall image.

For the production of the carpet, Franz Stein used the so-called tufting method, as it is a traditional craft and also allows for varying pile heights. In tufting the white base surface, lines of wool are manually tufted from top to bottom across the entire area, gradually filling the surface from one side to the other. Throughout this lengthy process, Franz Stein continuously made new decisions regarding colors, yarn structures, densities, heights, and the "cut or loop" question—whether the yarn should be cut or left in loops—for each colored area, thus composing both the overall piece and the individual detail of each carpet part.

After completing the tufted carpet segment, the artist glued the back of the carpet, cut it from the wooden frame, and evenly sheared the surface. The entire process, from design to finished product, took about 11 months.

With, in, and on the carpet, the viewer gets immersed into another cosmos, another present: The act of viewing the paintings on the wall is extended through bodily movement and the tactile experience of feeling and caressing. With this carpet, Franz Stein has transformed the spatial images of his painted canvases into a seemingly boundless visual space: the gallery is filled with sunlit love! And the Summer sun paints further images into the room through the arched windows...

– Text by Florian Matzner