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#6 Hot Coffee with an Artist

Series of conversations by Nina Mdivani

A cup of coffee with Berlin-based artist Sebastian Maas

Photo courtesy of the artist

Sebastian Maas, Berlin-based artist, studied through the system of German art schools and has absorbed lessons of old masters, now reinventing, and revisiting them in surprising and striking ways. Besides their strong technical skills Maas piques a curator’s interest due to their thoughtful engagement with the current problematic themes of a gendered society, of a progress as a model for humankind as well as of constraints of human versus animal nature. In the conversation below we have touched on these same themes. They approach the process with purely European grounding in history and science is interesting to contemplate.

Nina Mdivani: Sebastian, imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it?  What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?

Sebastian Maas: There is a yellow daybed in my studio, where you normally would find my dog. But for coffee in the morning, he would need to share the spot. I drink a black coffee— decaf at the moment — I had no idea how strong a caffeine withdrawal is. I see the garbage I need to take out. I see the catalogue I am reading at the moment (“Gender as a Spectrum“ by Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert) and the Berlin TV tower, super far away, but still iconic. 

Installation view of Distant Belongings, on view at 68 Projects, Berlin from January 14-February 25, 2023. Photo courtesy of the gallery and the artists.

NM: Please tell me about your ongoing exhibition at 68 Projects, Berlin. Where do you see yourself positioned within the Distant Belongings?

SM: I spread out quiet a large field of topics in the ongoing exhibition. And the field is even more stretched by Agnes Lammerts’ sculptural works. So, I read the title Distant Belonging more poetically than explicitly. But to be honest, the words had a stronger impact on me than expected. To find one’s own artistic language one would need to work within intellectual and formal constrains, so that the works could tell what their connections/belongings are …. but I am not sure I understand what they try to tell me 😉

The special nuance about this exhibition with 68Projects is that it is the first show I have here in Berlin. I moved here in the middle of the corona lockdown and takes a while to build up a new life in a new town during and right after the pandemic. 

Sebastian Maas, Nilpferdjagd, 2022. Oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm. Photo courtesy of the gallery and the artist.

NM: References to old masters are important for you. Where does this affinity come from and where does it end? And how do you decide what to revisit and what to keep from the original?

SM: Where it started is easy to say…. in the museum. And it started quite late, namely when I was 19. Until then I spent most of my time in the country side in a family and community, where art was not given much value. And art classes at school didn’t help either. Sure, the applause for being gifted in drawing and painting pushed the ego, but talking about art works was so didactic and uninspiring. So, when I moved to Munich I visited museums and with time, finally things from all eras have opened up to me. 

With the new series of works I do something I haven’t done before. I take the complete composition of a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, and draw over it on the iPad. Then, I transfer it to become painting on canvas. What I like about this digital pre-sketching is that you can make changes and reverse them faster and to a much greater degree than if you were doing it on a piece of paper. At the moment, I am interested in playing with changes in gender and adding an element of abstraction to the figures in Baroque works. As hunting scenes traditionally presented the male hunter at the center, when you play with gender our perception immediately screams „contemporary,” this simplifies things quite a bit. Hunting of a hippo – obviously a highly endangered species now, is another topic that is of importance to me. But even the original work painted over 400 years ago did not present the topic of hunting in an emotional way. It just was a good reason to create a composition. To me now, the work is more about our human ability to experience opulence and the power of art to redirect a concrete topic into something emotionally different, though we have a clear picture of every single part of the painting. That Baroque compositions can be read as contemporary within the current time from of pandemic, war and natural catastrophe, it can tell us a lot about our society.   

Detail, Sebastian Maas, Nilpferdjagd, 2022. Oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm. Photo courtesy of the gallery and the artist.

NM: As you have studied science and biology before studying art, what do you think about the idea of evolution and progress? Are we going forward as Western civilization or regressing and what role does art play in this movement or regression?

SM: In general, we surely have a forward movement, which does not exactly correspond to either moral or artistic level. It`s about the amount of energy we can use. Or in other words, the progress is about how efficiently we develop technology to use energy. Evolution as we learned it at school does not apply to humans for a very long time, but if a certain percentage of the world’s population cannot handle the digital era, with the social media and everything, and the suicide rate increases drastically (which it does), at a certain point we could face a natural selection again. This certainly could be a dystopian brain-fuck. Art can move on the whole spectrum of human potential, and especially on the emotional scale triggered by individual perception. Including emotional memories from, I wouldn’t know, how far back. So, art has a large potential of allowing us to experience humanity as a continuously developing species with different moral values over time and civilizations. If everybody would experience more art (not just contemporary) it would hopefully lead to a bit more serenity in this world. 

NM: Your work has many visual and conceptual levels, a theme that often connects them is gender. Do you believe that we live in a post-gender society?

SM: No, I don’t think we live in a post-gender society. For as long as gender is a central topic of discussion it has not found its way yet into a collective norm. But we are on a good way to the moment when sex does not determine our role within a society and that gender does not equal with the sex or sexual orientation. But it is very scary that in many countries around the world political forces representing strong conservative or extremist opinions still have a big influence. Which obviously means that many people are very scared of change, especially a change to gender roles as such this would question identity on a large scale. I very much hope for less aggression on all sides and that we learn not to protect our subjective morals, no matter what the price for that is. 

When I use a selfie and merge it with a woman’s face with the help of an app, I leave it to the algorithm to determine what the male and female attributes are. And to me the result differs a lot compared to pure human decision-making process. But when I take the generated figure and use it to create a classical portrait in oil, I use my subjective opinion to determine the output. With these works I am not only interested in gender, but also how my eye and work process collaborates with the computer generated material.

Hot Coffee with an Artist:

In these short conversations Nina Mdivani, Tbilisi-born and New York-based writer, curator and gallerist touches on topics of importance for the artists she encounters across the globe. They discuss coffee places, upcoming shows as well as what’s the crux of their artistic processes.

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