Where the Forest remembers Stefan Strumbel

Stefan Strumbel (b. 1979 in Offenburg, de) presents his fifth solo exhibition, Where the forest remembers, with Ruttkowski;68 in Paris.

Where the forest remembers. A place where the forest itself becomes a site of memory. A realm for reflecting on time, transience, and responsibility. In his newest body of work, Stefan Strumbel uses painting and sculpture to reflect on how landscapes absorb presence, and how personal and collective histories become intertwined in material, gesture, and form.

His paintings draw from the visual and emotional vocabulary of his homeland. Old postcards, archival fragments, and a layer of (“lupo”) bubble wrap serving as a protective and permeable second skin. The works carry within them the memory of past places, people, and stories. Their surfaces are delicate, almost breathing — a mesh of remembrance, loss, and quiet persistence. His sculptures give these echoes a body. Cast in bronze, the figures hold the gravity of permanence, yet bear the traces of vulnerability.

 An elderly woman meets the gaze of a fox; a man with an axe pauses mid-swing as squirrels climb up his body.figures of two migrant workers represent the weight of shared histories, which labor, migration, and the landscape of belonging are inseparably interwoven. The animals, arranged on an industrial shelf, appear like relics displaced from a distant past. The act of remembering, their quiet presence asks: what remains when everything passes? What do we preserve – and what do we lose in the process of progress?

Between the black forest and the vosges, between past and future, where the forest remembers opens a quiet, contemplative space for reconsidering notions of home, empathy, and shared humanity — an artistic response to a time in which the meaning of human connection must be renegotiated.