Itamar Stamler’s artistic practice moves between CGI, virtual reality, video, kinetic sculpture, and work with metal, ceramics, glass, airbrush, and found materials. The different media serve less as independent forms of expression than as elements of spatial and narrative experimental setups, in which questions of body, desire, control, and visibility overlap.
Many of his works function as closed systems in which visitors become both observers and participants. Inspired by Marc Augé’s concept of “non-places,” immersive environments emerge that make artificial intimacy, alienation, and collective memory tangible. Itamar Stamler repeatedly uses repurposed body-related devices to create sculptural arrangements out of repetitive movements, personal narratives, and elements of “body horror.”
Surveillance and voyeurism likewise appear in Stamler’s work less as themes than as structural conditions of perception and social interaction. Series such as Cry Baby and Masters negotiate the ambivalence of privacy and publicness, as well as the economies of attention, desire, and exploitation within neoliberal and queer lived realities. For the ongoing series Look at Me (since 2023), Stamler invites men from the dating app Grindr to multi-hour painting sessions. The deliberately flawed airbrush portraits resist the logic of flawless self-presentation, exposing the fragility of the image regimes in which contemporary notions of masculinity, identity, and attractiveness are produced.