Christian Stock

Since 1983, Christian Stock (b. Tux, Tyrol, 1961; lives and works in Vienna) has mostly painted squares: square upon square, layer upon layer, again and again. This incessant repetition of the icon of abstract painting, Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, results in a painting that is "objective" in the most literal sense. Precicely adding layer of paint to layer of paint in a process that takes years, Stock transforms the monochrome painting, the most abstract or most concrete form of his art, into a cube. A new realism of painting, a cubic picture, emerges. In this book, Christian Stock presents a survey of the cubic pictures he has created over the past three decades. The artist visits his collectors and takes photographs that show with their works; the camera also documents the cubic pictures in the storage departments of public collections as well as the works in progress at his studio. With essays by Graham Domke, Peter Friese, and Abraham Orden.