COLOGNE.- Stephan Melzl explores the shifting relationships between bodies, objects and space in Guter Hoffnung, an exhibition of new paintings on view from September 4 through October 24, 2026.

Across the works, familiar objects take on unexpected physical and psychological weight. Rounded vases echo the forms of women’s bodies, oversized boxing gloves appear almost protective, and chess pieces become metaphors for figures whose meaning changes according to their position in relation to everything around them.

The idea of chess runs throughout the exhibition. Several paintings take their titles from the game, including Zugzwang, the term for a position in which a player is forced to move even though every available move may leave them worse off. In Melzl’s work, the concept becomes a way of thinking about how a single movement can change an entire arrangement of bodies, objects and spaces.

Another title, Bedenkzeit, or “Thinking Time,” suggests a moment before the next move is made. That sense of anticipation is central to the paintings. Although Melzl’s figures and objects are rendered with considerable realism and physical precision, their relationships remain unsettled. The scenes often seem to be waiting for something to happen.

In Double Punch, a young boy wears boxing gloves that are visibly too large for him. The gloves become more than sporting equipment: they suggest a kind of armor for the life ahead of him. The contrast between the child and the oversized objects creates a broader dialogue between youth and age, innocence and experience, and outward appearances and what they may conceal.

Melzl repeatedly returns to similar bodies, postures, vessels and figures, creating variations that echo from one painting to another. His sharply defined forms and pronounced use of light, shadow and contrast give the subjects a strong physical presence, yet the relationships between them remain fluid.





That tension also brings life to objects traditionally associated with still-life painting. Vases, clothing, gloves and other seemingly inanimate forms are never merely passive. Through their placement alongside human figures, they appear to take on identities and roles of their own.

In Zugzwang, the relationship between bodies becomes particularly direct: a woman’s spread legs form a space in which a boy stands with his own legs crossed. Elsewhere, the vase becomes both a container and a passage. In Outside In, a cat moves into a vase; in Inside Out, a cat emerges from one.

These images turn the vessel into something more than an object that simply holds another thing. It becomes a place of transition, where forms can disappear, pass through boundaries and reappear.

Throughout Guter Hoffnung, Melzl is concerned with what can be carried, hidden or suggested by an external form. Bodies, clothes, gloves, vases and game pieces may be clearly defined, but what they contain — emotionally, symbolically or physically — remains less certain.

The result is a group of paintings in which almost nothing appears to happen in a conventional narrative sense, yet the relationships between people, objects and spaces create a persistent feeling of movement. Each element seems fixed and precisely placed, while at the same time remaining open to another move, another interpretation and another possible relationship.

Rather than bringing these tensions to a conclusion, Melzl allows them to remain active. Like a chess game waiting for its next move, the paintings hold their figures and objects together without ever fully resolving what might happen next.