Sebi Schager (AT) – Ich Sage dir: Steh auf und geh! Es ist dir noch kein Knochen gebrochen

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 translated back into physical form through plotters, stencils, and direct painting. Gold meets street, canon meets intervention.

Ich Sage dir: Steh auf und geh! Es ist dir noch kein Knochen gebrochen. — the closing line of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Das dreißigste Jahr (1961), a story about the crisis of turning thirty. Sebi printed the edition for his own 30th birthday in 2014 — the literary command becoming a personal one. A nude classical Venus stands center stage, behind her a draped fabric that recalls Zurbarán’s Martyrdom of St. Serapion — cloth as both shroud and stage curtain. At her feet, two skeletons. Three golden balls distribute the weight of the composition — and the argument: one rests in the hand of a youthful bust, hand as craft, the ability to create; the second sits beside the right skeleton’s skull, too much thinking — the intellect can paralyze; the third lodges in the ribcage of the left skeleton, too much feeling — the heart can be equally fatal for an artist’s work. Three dispositions, only one survives: the maker. 1984 marks both Orwell’s dystopia and Sebi’s birth year. Three arrows in the upper right — one for each decade, each ripening differently. A work of self-reflection — a way to bring order into what reality throws at a young person going forward. Bachmann’s imperative to get up and keep walking, carried from page to screen print.

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About the artist