stefan moses

A World Theatre

stefan moses

The world is a stage. In the wings of work and everyday life, against a backdrop of hope and care, we perform our tiny roles in the vast world theatre. Perhaps we’re not aware of the play. Perhaps the stages are too large and the masquerades have become like a second skin. We know neither the title of the piece, nor do we know the author, set designer or any happy endings. We’re just mimes, imposters of social roles, actors in beloved figurations. At certain moments, however, we start to understand. And then an unaccustomed look from the outside suffices, and we peer along with it into our absurd theatrum mundi.
It’s a gaze of the kind that stefan moses, born 1928 in Liegnitz, has. In nearly all of his major portrait series, moses succeeded in portraying people as the actors of their own lives, whether in his series Artists Make Masks, Self in the Mirror or his famous Germans. Through a selection of various work groups, the exhibition shows pictures of people in an interplay of identity, role and masquerade. Ralf Hanselle