As a conceptual artist, I question routines that we encounter in our everyday lives in very different ways. Surely, routines can have their justification and benefit. For example, they can help to structure our daily lives and give us a sense of being located. However, artistic and social novelty always requires a breaking up of routines. By taking things out of their habitual contexts, I question habitualised perspectives and thereby open up new spaces.

In addition to the function of space as a physical place, the term is also to be understood as a space for thinking, reflecting and questioning. My work is about exploring space in this comprehensive understanding – with all its interstices, its breaks, its emergence and its disappearance. This complexity is a characteristic of my artistic work. I consider transitions as well as the transformative in itself and dedicate myself to the formless, the formative as well as the form itself.

I regard my works of art as a condensation of aesthetic space, which serve as projection surfaces for determining one’s own position. Like a paradox, the process of condensation goes hand in hand with giving space. Just as silence is the prerequisite for hearing a sound, this giving of space is a further prerequisite for the creation and experience of the new. Only when there is free space, things can be created in it. My task as an artist is to create this space and to express it aesthetically in a form.

It is important to understand that it is not the artist who creates art. Art is a universal principle and has been part of human history for thousands of years. It is the resonance of the viewer that ultimately makes a work of art. I therefore like to play with the position of the artist and the relationship to the viewer and to blur the barrier between these actors. This is one reason why I like to work with installations in which the viewer can actively participate. As in my installation CONSTRUCTION | DECONSTRUCTION (2017), for example, where exhibition visitors were able to give my installation a new form again and again by placing white cardboard boxes in the room.

My artistic work is a plea for the creative potential of human existence. The questions that many people ask are: How do we deal with our creativity? What can we do with our potentials? I see the works I create as a way of cultivating creative potential – not only for me as an artist, but also for the viewer. The viewer is given the opportunity to understand my artistic work and to expand it through his or her own interpretation and imagination. My understanding of cultivation is based in particular on allowing. Figuratively speaking, it is about not locking a door in the first place, instead of training how to open a locked door as quickly as possible. So my focus is on what interferes with our creative abilities, rather than just practicing improving individual creative qualities. It is this sense of allowing that stimulates creative openness, which in turn is reflected in the variety of materials I use.

There is no doubt that I – like every artist – am influenced by my environment and vice versa. Therefore, I reflect with my conceptual work on themes that oscillate between the social and the individual level. My artistic examination always takes place within the amplitude of thinking and perception.

© Markus Feiler