SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- German painter Stefan K黵ten is known for depicting the domestic architecture of our dreams – rich with the promise of mid-century prosperity – yet uncannily depopulated, and in the surreal palette of a colorized film or in burnished gold and shadowy blacks. Luxurious, seductive and unsettling, these images of the “perfect home” explore the power of familiar-looking spaces to challenge the veracity of your memory: “Have I been here before? Do I know this place?”

For the first time in his nearly 40-year career, the answer is “Yes.” K黵ten’s newest work shifts from imagined buildings to real, politically and culturally loaded ones: the White House, the New York Stock Exchange, the legendary Dakota Apartments and Chateau Marmont, and San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. Classical rather than Modernist in style, these structures were designed to symbolize timelessness, solidity, prestige and entitlement. But they were inspired by the misperceived and idealized ruins of long-dead civilizations. In K黵ten’s paintings, you get the sense that you’re a witness to these bastions of American authority the moment they too degenerate into ruin.

Carved into wooden panels that would normally be used to make woodblock prints, then painted, K黵ten subverts the purpose of his art-making materials to remind us of unrealized potential – of the prints that will never be made and the stability we so desire, but never quite find.





Along with these studies of power and collapse are three of K黵ten’s monumentally scaled, all-over-pattern compositions, kaleidoscopically covered in an architectural jumble of autobiographical, historical, and cultural references. If the carved works envision monuments to our collective aspirations, these sprawling paintings turn inward, toward the more personal architecture of memory and desire. Exhibited together, they depict the worlds we build in pursuit of the perfect life — homes, institutions, narratives, ideals — and ask us to consider what we find when those fantasies begin to crack apart.

Hosfelt Gallery has represented Stefan K黵ten since its founding in 1996. This is the eleventh solo exhibition stemming from that partnership.

K黵ten was formerly a professor at the famed Kunstakademie D黶seldorf, where, as a young artist, he studied with Michael Buthe. He is also an alumnus of the San Francisco Art Institute. Solo museum exhibitions include the Kunstmuseum M黮heim an der Ruhr, Germany; K黱stlerverein Malkasten, D黶seldorf; Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; and Museum im Kulturspeicher, W黵zburg, Germany. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and many others. He lives with his wife and daughter in D黶seldorf.