Stephan Meissner is a visual artist with roots in classical graffiti style writing, whose work has evolved into a strongly reduced, abstract visual language focused on line, rhythm, and contrast. Using tape as his primary medium, he explores clarity, control, and spatial composition, treating the material as both a conceptual tool and a precise visual instrument. As co-founder of TAPE THAT, he has helped shape the international development of tape art while continuously expanding its possibilities within contemporary art.
Graffiti style writing was, early on, an intense exploration of letters as form and system for me. Even though it is often perceived as a free or anarchic form of expression, it is actually strongly based on clear rules, proportions, and repetition. This tension between individual handwriting and predefined structures has had a lasting impact on me. My current reduced visual language is a consequence of that: instead of depicting letters directly, I engage with their fundamental elements – line, direction, rhythm, and contrast. The reduction is not a renunciation, but rather a focus on what is essential.
Tape is an everyday material that you consciously use as an artistic medium. What attracts you to this apparent limitation, and what conceptual and visual possibilities does it open up for you?
Tape and adhesive films inherently bring a clear, linear aesthetic. The most obvious – and formally the simplest – element is the straight line. Contrast, too, is already embedded in the material: color and surface stand directly and precisely next to one another, without requiring layering or variations in intensity, as in painting. This formal clarity is immanent to the medium.
Beyond that, the appeal for me lies in the working process. In contrast to spray paint or a brush, the line in tape is fully visible before it is set. I can position it in space, align it, and correct it before it is permanently fixed. Only by pressing it down does the stroke become binding. This approach is very deliberate and controlled – almost more comparable to digital drawing than to a gestural painting process.
I do not have the impression that the medium itself has fundamentally changed in recent years. Rather, the perception of what is possible with tape has expanded. Today, tape is understood less as an effect or stylistic device and increasingly as a serious tool within various artistic approaches. For me, it should not primarily be about defining tape art as an independent category. More interesting is tape as another medium that allows certain things to be solved differently than with classical or comparable materials. In this openness, I also see the future of the medium.
For the guest curation of “New Perspectives,” I selected artists whose paths have likely crossed multiple times in Berlin and who work within a similar urban and contemporary context. Berlin as a place of living served as the connecting bracket – less in the sense of a unified style, and more as a shared space of resonance.
What interests me is precisely this coexistence of proximity and difference: positions that orbit around one another without following a stylistic unison. The exhibition is about the interplay of these works within the space – about friction, complementarity, and openness, without prescribing a single clear interpretation.
Your works often move within a field of tension between control and deviation, order and rupture. Is this tension also reflected in your curatorial approach – and if so, how does it become perceptible to the audience?
I did not consciously transfer the tension from my own artistic practice into the curation. In this case, it was less about a formal concept and more about a shared context.
I selected artists who work in Berlin and whose paths have crossed repeatedly in recent years. The approach was more organic than constructed.
If tension arises in the space, it does so through the different individual visual languages themselves – not through a curatorial system imposed on top of them.
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