Sebi Schager (AT) – Mother with Child

Sebi works across spray stencils, robotic pen drawing, gold leaf, and digital collage — his practice moves between appropriation and reinvention, art-historical imagery taken apart, digitally recombined, then brought back into physical form. His stencil work follows a mono-stencil approach: a single, highly complex halftone mask carries the entire image definition — no layering, no registration. Beneath it, a carefully composed underpainting sets the colour field. The bridges that hold the stencil together become a stylistic signature, and every spray pass is final. Each piece is hand-sprayed onto archival paper, making every piece in the small edition a unique original.

Mother with Child translates a canvas original into an edition on paper — a Madonna carrying the Christ child on her shoulders, both wearing masks. Made in 2018, two years before the pandemic turned masked faces into a global symbol, the image reads today like a premonition. But the masks here carry their own iconography: hers shows Hello Kitty, his a crossed bone — innocence and mortality, pop and memento mori, worn like armour. The background dissolves into graffiti; the letters Y and O surface like fragments of YOLO — street philosophy meeting sacred painting. The child looks straight at the viewer with the upward-pointing gesture toward God — a motif found in centuries of Christian painting, from Leonardo's John the Baptist to Raphael's Madonnas. She looks away. Gold leaf sits beneath the stencil layer — the sacred ground literally under the street, revealed only at the edges where spray and mask allow it through.

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About the artist