bio

Samuel Ferstl (b. 1991, Munich, Germany) is an artist and scholar, currently residing between Taipei and Hualien, Taiwan. Particularly interested in contemporary art, Ferstl has received an in-depth education during his studies of Visual Arts and Stage Design from 2011 to 2021 at art schools in Munich, Athens, Düsseldorf, and Kassel, where he graduated as Meisterschüler of Andrea Büttner. Ferstl’s interest in art theory, critical studies, and cultural studies has shaped his research since 2016 and has led him to extend his academic endeavors into Critical and Curatorial Studies / Western Art History since 2022, along with a Doctoral candidacy in Transdisciplinary Arts starting in 2024. Furthermore, a stronger emphasis on collaborative work since 2019 has resulted in the initiation of a curatorial project called Performance Epistemology in 2021, which has been recognized as an art gallery since 2023. Since the beginning of his studies, Ferstl has been awarded a variety of prizes, scholarships, and cultural funding, and has been able to show his art internationally, such as at Young Meditarreanan Artist’s Biennial (Milano) 2015, State of Concepts (Athens) 2016, documentaHalle (Kassel), 2021, and Tacheles (Taipei), 2022.

His studies included visiting exhibition programs, artist lectures, seminars, and work across most contemporary artistic media, such as printmaking, painting, drawing, 3D art, video, sound, performance art, sculpture (using wood, plaster, clay, and metal), as well as textiles and fabrics. Partly inspired by prose and literature, as well as critical and art historical studies, his main medium is installation, often resembling a liminal space between a site of exploration and an expressive collection of props, costumes, and other requisites. Being rooted in conceptual, analytical and reflexive art practices, however, Ferstl has developed recently towards recalling deeper engagement with visual and sensorial aspects of the respective medium.

In his scholarly work, Ferstl’s research interests encompass exhibition histories and notions of art, particularly since the beginning of modernity in the late 19th century, as well as large-scale exhibitions of the 20th and 21st centuries. He focuses on the materialization of cultural-political agendas in the arts, with specific emphasis on reform politics, avant-garde artist circles, alternative art movements, art educational practices, utopian thought, and mass art events. He is currently dedicated to the analysis of documenta fifteen and previous iterations in the light of contemporary leftist cultural art discourse. He is further engaging with notions of art, focusing on the critique of aestheticism, and a notion of the sensorial and semiological in hermeneutical art discourse. He is furthermore engaging with a PhD project at the intersection of practical and aesthetic formation with the working title ‘From Creative to Complex Thinking: A Contemporary Artist’s Handbook”. Thus, as part of his on-going art history studies, Ferstl engages with various art historical subjects from their very early stages.




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