Steffen Kern moves through the world with the sensibility of someone who sees images before they fully exist — half-formed flashes of light, memories, and moods that later settle onto paper. Based in Munich, he honed his craft at the Academy of Fine Arts under Karin Kneffel, with a formative detour to study with Daniel Richter in Vienna. The academic path is there, yes, but what truly shaped him is his instinct for turning the familiar into something quietly haunting.
Kern works almost exclusively with pencil and charcoal, sometimes letting color slip in when the image calls for it. What makes his drawings so compelling is that they come entirely from within — no photographs, no staged references, just this internal archive of scenes that feel like they might have been lifted from a film still, a childhood memory, or a collective subconscious. He leans into photographic logic — bloom, depth of field, the sharp cut of direct light — and translates those effects into something tactile and human. Everything is rendered with a kind of luminous restraint: shadows that behave like characters, highlights that feel almost sculpted.
His trajectory has been steady and well-earned. Kern has received major grants — from Bavaria’s Young Art & New Paths program to the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation — and his work has found its way into collections such as the LAM Museum, ING Global Art Collection, KPMG, and Aegon. He’s exhibited widely, from solo shows like Drawings from the Mental Archive in Hamburg to international fairs and gallery presentations. Despite the scale of his CV, what anchors his practice is simple: a commitment to taking everyday motifs — a room, a chair, a moment of stillness — and turning them into images that linger long after you’ve stopped looking.
