Stefan- Mitzlaff 1997 Anthoniweg 16 D 34131 Kassel fax: +49 - 561 31 44 51

curriculum vitae

Born 1943 in Berlin. My mother is a potter, my father was an- architect who studied in Zurich together with emigrated /BAUHAUS/-students.

As I wanted to become a film maker [which I never was] X studied Graphic Arts and Photography for the formal aspects, and Social Sciences, Philosophy for the content in Basel and in Mannheim.

After already having begun an artists career in Basel I was ''taken'' by the late 60s, and I engaged myself strongly in the fields of social reforms, painting little, and working myself deeply into the reforms of Psychiatry. Thus I worked in one the first German psychiatric hospitals with open doors, psychotherapy, and with working and protected housing facilities for long term patients. I wrote several books and articles on the matter, and I taught Social Psychiatry at several universities in West and East Europe and in,the US; this, during the Cold War, was especially complex. Such I found many humanistic and reformist colleagues in Eastern European Countries since 1984.

In the late 80s - when most of psychiatric deficiencies were named, the means to overcome "psychiatry as a disease" were elaborated and empirically well tested -I was in my late 40s, and I wanted to see whether I was able to hook up to my artistic work again.

Thus , after a professorship at the Universities of Kassel, Germany, and Honolulu, USA, my family and I moved to Kassel, and I focused on painting, photography, and watercolors in a studio of my own ever after 1989. Certainly my social and political awareness did not leave me, however in a way I was fitted with substantial experience on that matter.

In the very same year I helped to transport the first edition (after 5o years) of Ossip Mandelstam poems in a hospital car from the Tomsk/Siberia editor, I could talk to some "Samisdat"- persons, and little later Olga and Jifi Sozanski and I met in Kassel when Jifi worked on his installation here.

There you are with the two key situations leading to this exhibition.

I began reading the poems and essays of this great European humanistic Russian author from Paul Celans translations, and from the most carefully documented and meanwhile almost complete translations of Ralph Dutli. Mandelstam, friend of Anna Achmatova , consequently kept distance from power, and vulnerable as he such was, kept his writing from

compromise . His courageous "Epigram against Stalin"(l933) is the same a good example for the dignity of this intellectual as is the "Oda Stalinu"(l937) , 18 months before he died in a forced labour camp near Vladivostok: full of blank hesitation and provoking doubts.

Little did I illustrate certain texts or its passages. However I choose three aspects to compliment Mandelstams work:

1 . His idea or proposition of a "Grave in the Air" waltering over grounds of refusal (Verses of the unknown soldier, 1937) : the prototype situation for humanistic intellectuals in our European 20th century's cultures.

2. My "Breathing Books" denoting the most wonderful fact that the readers [by samisdat] kept these texts alive for the full SO years of strict censorship.

3. Mandelstams situation during his last years banned in Woronesh: insisting on working though the hope to ever find his reader/partner was vanishing every month.

Olga, Jifi and I first met about 5 years ago, and immediately we found our common senses on civil life, politics, and Che role fine arts [should) have in it. with my minimum of insight into the working conditions before 1988/9 I appreciated Jifi's work [that far above all in Most and in Terezinl] very much.

Adding my knowledge about the "western cultural traffic noise" and my pedagogical experience, and very much with the support of Olga's "Symposion Praha for Cultural Exchange" in an almost "organic" way - and quite on our own - we took action in the fields of fine arts, the music, and in education.

That far - and meanwhile with the Syposion Praha daughter "Symposion Hessen" - we organized mutual exhibitions in the two countries, I could share (very much with the support of the CZ-TV "People in Need Foundation" and their splendid infrastructure] a trip with Jifi and other Czech colleagues to Bosnia in Spring 1996 and I could take an exhibition with the works of Hessian artists there; also Symposion organized language classes in Kassel for physically handicapped students from Liberec and install a partnership with a German School; in 1996 we edited the "Buch für Sarajevo" with texts of J. Sozansky, S. Mitzlaff and S. Musabegovic and with Sozanskis etchings; we shared the organization of concerts and a young composers competition CZ/BRD(l99T) [with Musica Judaica Praha and Studio für Neue Musik der Musikakademie Kassel], and we had a most successful 10 days class on Glass (Sklo! ) with German design students in Northern Czechia in cooperation with Ajeto!/Egermann, the Jablonec School of Bijouterie and with partners in Liberec (October 1997) .

Much of what we are doing is a real "first go"- finding its institutionalization after the first successful round. Such we permanently are underfunded and at times quite stressed.

Still, with seeing the power of new money too oftenly running people mad, I am very satisfied about the mutuality and concern of our projects, and I am grateful to have found so many competent, friendly, and reliable partners in Central Europe.

Ever since 1990 I had solo exhibitions in Northern Hessia, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Praha, Liberec and substantial contributions to group exhibitions in the us and Basel. I published presentations about Art Brut, Arts and Aesthetics, and the role of Arts in crisis situations. Annually I am editing the EDITION BBK with regional artists. I published short stories on cassette, taken in Hessischer Rundfunk 1995/6.

My exhibition with paintings to the works of Ossip Mandelstam in Brüder Grimm Museum Kassel in Spring v997 was very successful. with the help of Symposion Praha, Goethe Institut St. Petersburg, Goethe Institut Prag, Ost-West- Wissenschaftszentrum GhK Universität Kassel and the Anna Achmatova Museum in St. Petersburg and the Galery Fronta in Praha this show will be seen in Praha, st. Petersburg, in Jaroslawl, and in Moskva. A catalog will be published.

The Praha exhibition at gallery Fronta will show the Mandelstam paintings, paintings about Bosnia and "ethnical cleansing" and about the fate of northern Czechian Landscape and its industrialization/exploitation.

Mostly I am working in "projects" , i.e. for a year or two I am working on a specific theme mostly with the same media.

The 1994 exhibition at ATRIUM Praha showed mostly watercolors under motto taken both from "black pedagogics" and from dictatorships: You have to eat what you find on your table!

The paintings to be seen now in Fronta with their three themes mentioned above are Monotypes or Monotypes-painted-over (oil on cotton paper).

In a monotype the paint is put on a glass screen and then one print (mono-typos) is taken on paper. Variances of that method are abound, and I found some techniques of my own.