Sebastian Gumpinger’s practice revolves around the line - not as a static boundary, but as a dynamic agent that occupies space, reflects light, and interacts with perception. Using angle grinders, he carves gestural, rhythmic marks into highly polished steel and copper surfaces. Despite their physical thinness - often just 2 mm - the plates appear sculptural, almost voluminous. Light becomes an active component of the work: as the viewer moves, the surface shifts, creating a visual experience that is constantly in flux. The works appear not as static images, but as living surfaces that respond to time, space, and presence.
Gumpinger’s approach is deeply informed by biography. He spent his early years in Morocco, Italy, and the Canary Islands - an upbringing shaped by cultural diversity and sensory impressions. A formative experience occurred in a French preschool in Agadir: too young to read, he began copying letters from the blackboard purely for their form, detached from linguistic meaning. This early experience of line as symbol and abstraction remains central to his work. Later, growing up in Germany, he immersed himself in graffiti, skate, and hip-hop culture - where gesture, rhythm, and physical expression define visual language. These influences converge in his practice today: intuitive, physical, and deeply material.
His works operate at the intersection of drawing, sculpture, and light-based installation. In an art-historical context, Gumpinger can be seen in dialogue with artists like Jonathan Lasker - who treats the line as a constructed, graphic element—and Brice Marden, whose calligraphic flows carry spiritual and emotional resonance. Gumpinger merges these positions: his lines are both intuitively driven and formally precise; they are markings of inner rhythm as well as spatial structures. Light is not just an effect, but an integral material that activates each piece.
Gumpinger’s “Steel Paintings” challenge the viewer’s perception and demand movement. They blur the boundaries between object and image, gesture and structure, surface and depth - offering a meditative yet dynamic encounter with material and form.
