Stefan Rinck

Stefan Rinck’s stone figures form a motley and comical community of, for the most part, animals, chimeras and monsters. They wear costumes and masks; are endowed with particular symbols or characteristics, some bear the names of heroes of Greek mythology or of legend. Rinck’s sculpted figures make up a discordant but related assembly of non-humans: they come from elsewhere, an archaic imaginary world, woven from myths and legends. With his collection of fauna, the artist is using a technique typical of the Middle Ages: sculpting his figures directly from stone.

Rinck’s sculptures remind us of the figures of Roman art, which populate the columns and tympana of churches. These are grotesque figures, in which we recognize the vitalist comedy typical of medieval realism which could be observed during the parades of jesters and buffoons at religious and popular festivities. Yet if the Middle Ages seem to color Rinck’s art, its frame of reference in fact crystalizes around a number of “Gothic” obsessions of the Romantic kind: a taste for mythology and folk tales, for different epochs and cultures for the fantastic or figures of hubris and excess.

Stefan Rinck has had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the Domaine de Chamarande (2025), as well as group exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and the MAC Marseille (2024). He has also exhibited at international fairs and biennials, including Art Basel Paris, the Artzuid Sculpture Biennial in Amsterdam (2025) and FIAC Hors les murs at the Tuileries (2019). One of his sculptures is on permanent display in Paris since 2018 (Beaupassage). In 2019, he was selected among 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, published by Thames & Hudson.