ALESSANDRO BOSTELMANN
BED PAINTINGS  

The scene in Metaphorical Composition with Vacuum Cleaners (2026) seems simple: five nude figures—three women and two men—drag vacuum cleaners across a flat, almost abstract plane. Bodies coil into one another and discharge into an absurd, barely visually graspable flesh‑and‑vacuum tangle of limbs, genitals, orifices, and machine parts. The figures touch without actually making contact; they generate proximity without relationship. That is the register in which Alessandro Bostelmann speaks: the body as a stage for a present that perfects its rituals and loses its empathy.

Thus stands the human being: the body, its social constitution, its vulnerability, its absurdity—these have always occupied the center of Bostelmann’s painting. In the new works of the Bed Paintings group, this engagement takes on a renewed existential edge. The exhibition’s title points to the concrete conditions of their making: the works are largely painted from bed, in a process adapted to the artist’s illness. Bostelmann, who has ME/CFS, can only rarely leave his bed and his room. His paintings emerge in short, interrupted intervals, in a rhythm shaped by illness, exhaustion, and a radically altered perception of time.

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This biographical situation is not merely background to the exhibition; it structures the works both conceptually and formally. The world appears here not as an open horizon, but as a cosmos drawn from psychic, mediated, and imagined spaces—unfolding from the confines of a single room. Isolation and monotony shift perception and attention: memories, dreams, inner images, and digitally mediated presentness press more forcefully to the fore. Bostelmann’s paintings condense into scenes where the intimate, the grotesque, the comic, and the unsettling interlock inextricably.

What remains characteristic is the focus on the naked human body. His figures are unclothed, overextended, twisted, entwined. They never appear sovereign; they look functional. Nudity is never simply a sign of closeness or truth in his images. Rather, it constantly toggles between exposure and estrangement. The body becomes the site of the gaze, of desire, of projection—and at the same time a stubborn surface on which any claim to clarity fails. Where one expects intimacy, distance appears. Where one seeks definitiveness, ambivalence begins. From this springs a shrewd strategy against stereotypes: Bostelmann disassembles heteronormative imperatives, cites their gestures, and places them into grotesque scenarios until they shed their power.

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Many of the depicted scenes revolve around everyday acts: care, desire, waiting, exhaustion, touch, retreat. Yet nothing here is merely everyday. Bostelmann translates mundane tasks and social routines into pictorial spaces of peculiar tension. His figures clean, cling, pose, desire, collapse, or remain in absurd configurations without ever quite meeting one another. Proximity appears as a bodily fact, not an emotional bond. Touch does not dissolve distance; it intensifies it, paradoxically.

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Here lies one of the decisive qualities of this painting: it renders the human not as a harmonious unity of body and self, but as a precarious, often contradictory arrangement. Bodies in Bostelmann’s images are neither ideal carriers of identity nor sovereign instruments of will. They seem exposed—to social expectations, gendered attributions, medical interpretive frameworks, the demands of intimacy, and the norms of social legibility. It is precisely within this tension that the political dimension of his art takes shape.

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This becomes especially clear in works that touch on experiences of illness and medical authority. Bostelmann is not simply negotiating personal suffering here, but the question of who gets to speak about bodies, interpret them, and fix their reality. Historical images of hysteria, psychosomatic ascription, and gender‑coded hypersensitivity are not illustrated in his work; they are transformed into grotesque, memorable pictorial inventions. Humor never serves to trivialize; it is a tool of precision. The ridiculous lays bare ideological structures. Precisely because Bostelmann admits the absurd, violence, powerlessness, and alienation become all the more sharply visible. This is evident in his painting Wandering Uterus in a Landscape (2026), where he casts the ancient myth—lasting into the Middle Ages—of the “wandering uterus” as a cheerful hybrid creature strolling through a meadow. Humor here excavates ideological layers: medicine was and is no neutral space. The work cuts a feminist path through diagnostic discourses in which female experience is still psychologized today.

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At the same time, Bed Paintings is not a purely dark exhibition. Amid fragility, exhaustion, and social isolation, the paintings assert an idiosyncratic form of vitality. They are populated by deformed yet intensely present bodies, by figures who fail, contort, look ridiculous, and nevertheless do not disappear. In some works, cheerfulness, tenderness, or self‑irony surface—not as a counterworld to pain, but as forms of survival. It is precisely in this coexistence of comedy and existential gravity that Bostelmann’s painting achieves its particular intensity.

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This is evident in the work Cheerful Hermaphrodite with Hair Dryer (2026). Against a dark, baroque‑tinged ground appears a hybrid figure: the head of an old man—clearly inspired by the expressive intensity of an ecstatic saint in a painting by Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652)—rests on a taut, female‑coded body. Thrown back with pleasure, the head lets warm air from a hair dryer stream through the beard. Sacred lighting meets a profane everyday gesture in a pictorial constellation that is at once absurd and precisely composed. The hermaphrodite returns in my work as a figure of pleasurable ambiguity and cheerful eccentricity. Here, however, it does not appear as a nostalgic motif, but as an integrative gesture in which different phases of the work are newly brought into relation. Within a body of work that also speaks of illness, fragility, and doubt, it marks a moment of self‑acceptance, cheerfulness, and bodily affirmation.

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Bed Paintings presents an artist whose world has radically shrunk—and whose pictorial universe gains new scope precisely from that. From limitation arises not a retreat into the private, but a precise, unsparing, and surprisingly poetic gaze on the present. Bostelmann’s paintings demonstrate that the supposedly small room is not a closed place, but a resonance chamber where bodily history, society, desire, illness, memory, and art history overlap. Thus the bed becomes not only a site of weakness, but also the point of departure for a painting practice that, out of extreme constraint, develops a complex, idiosyncratic, and disturbingly lucid pictorial language.