STERNBAUER as SUSI POP

The work "Shipwreck" was created as part of a specialized course at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. We had the opportunity to embody SUSI POP and engage with a contemporary issue in the spirit of SUSI POP. I saw it as a necessity to establish a connection between art history and the present. The painting "The Raft of the Medusa" by Théodore Géricault dealt with a real disaster; the shipwreck of the Medusa, where the privileged aboard could take the lifeboats, while the rest of the crew had to construct a raft from the ship that ran aground on a sandbank in the middle of the Atlantic. Only 13 people survived. Just as back then, today the privileged can travel wherever they want, while the less privileged, in search of a better life, often have no choice but to embark on a perilous journey.

In the year 2023, estimates as of January 2024 indicate that over 3,000 people died attempting to cross the Mediterranean. The death toll was particularly high in 2016 when more than 5,000 people perished on their way to Europe via sea.

Mediterranean drowned refugees by escape routes until 2023

Shipwreck

Among the seemingly endless possibilities of human failure, shipwreck occupies a special place. Only a few ever experience it firsthand, and yet many believe they know what it is about, suggesting that the term seems to harbor a collective reservoir of experience.

Shipwreck is, in the truest sense, something elemental, fundamental; it signifies the looming cold, wet, desolate, lonely end. Even the distant observer is not immune to the horrors associated with this fate, whether learning about the real event from the comfort of an armchair or deliberately exposing themselves to the pleasant shivers as a reader of novels or in front of the screen.

The shipwreck has become a cultural myth, immortalized in literature, theater, film, and art as a universally understood metaphor for what can happen to humans when their own mistakes and the forces of nature unite ominously.

The shipwreck as a punishment for the technologically based hubris of humanity (Titanic)

A significantly more contemporary example of moral collapse, symbolized by shipwreck, is provided by the case of the ill-fated captain of the "Costa Concordia," who simply fled from the responsibility entrusted to him.

Due to the societal importance and urgency of the topic, the initiator of SUSI POP committed to producing the painting "The Raft of Medusa" in its original size. In collaboration with Kasper König, SUSI POP was able to present the painting to a wide audience in its original size at the König Gallery. Thank you, SUSI POP.

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