Norbert Stefan (b. 1990, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) lives and works in Berlin. He graduated in fine art from the Art and Design University of Cluj-Napoca in 2012, with a focus on printmaking, painting and photography, and that training still shows in the tinted quality of his colour, close to film being developed. Through the Romanian art community he went on to assist Adrian Ghenie in his Berlin studio, a period he describes as a Renaissance style apprenticeship, and left it with the encouragement of the British curator Jane Neal to work on his own. He paints in layers of free associated colour and in decalcomania, a transfer printing technique he uses not to depict a motif but as the motif itself. The surfaces refuse to settle: one moment microscopic detail, the next a field of marks like pixels, closer to a scan than a landscape. He works from 3D scans, satellite images and the animation of black holes and dark matter, images that only exist because a technology makes them readable, and he lets chance decide what happens on the canvas.
Solo exhibitions include New Dawn Fade (2020), Isle of Mind (2021) and City of Glass (2024) at Jean-Claude Maier Gallery in Frankfurt, and Decalphilia at DSC Gallery in Prague (2020), with a two person show at DSC in 2022 and group exhibitions in Berlin.
In 2023 Stefan took part in Hyper-Reality at Plan X Capri.
