MORE OR LESS – a contemporary collage exhibition by Kai Holland and Stefan Schneider
Stefan Schneider and Kai Holland are two artists who are diametrically opposed to each other in the broad phalanx of the contemporary collage world – the analog paper works of the two collagists could not be more different: while Schneider creates minimalist works with clear forms by reducing them to the simplest structures and geometric elements, Holland condenses thousands of tiny photo snippets into infernal, multi-scenic miniatures that seem to have sprung from the minds of Pieter Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch.
Whereas Holland’s visual language, with its deliberate, driven excess, focuses entirely on the “more” of the image, Schneider consistently explores the limits of the “less” of his minimalism. “More or Less” succeeds in simultaneously characterizing and intensifying the artistic idiosyncrasies and contrasts of both working methods in a tension-filled juxtaposition—the result is a balancing act between stagnation and dynamism, between equilibrium and total energy overload, or between less and sometimes more.
Collage plays a decisive role in artistic image creation over the last 100 years as a technique of imagination and a process of invention. Conceived as a revolt against painting as an art of imitation, collage has represented the ability of the mind to grasp several aspects of an object simultaneously since Cubism. It is also a means by which artists incorporate reality into an image without imitating it. At a time when the term “cut and paste” refers more often to digital operations than to the use of scissors and glue, it seems essential to examine this central process. The selection of these two Berlin artists exemplifies how unique and diverse contemporary collage art is between painting and photography, between craftsmanship and the mediated reality of our time, and what an important role it continues to play in the art world.
Please feel invited to our
VERNISSAGE – OCT 11 2025 – 6-10 pm
Kai Holland
As senior photo editor at a renowned photo agency, Kai Holland sits directly at the source of inspiration for his artistic work—because Holland weaves what he sees every day into fantastic hidden object pictures of crude creatures, monstrous machine parts, and delicate flying objects. The clusters of his detailed and mannered arrangements of found objects are graphic cabinets of curiosities created by an obsessed collagist whose subtle and humorous gaze reveals the dilemma of the cycle of creation and destruction.
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Stefan Schneider
Stefan Schneider’s latest works thrive on the tension between radical simplicity and subtle complexity, which he creates through reduced production methods and deliberately graphic interpretations. Inspired by the industrial architectural style of standardized residential buildings, he transfers their serial grids into strictly geometric systems. The deliberately chosen materials have their own past. They reveal and recall things that already carry a history within themselves.
The monochrome color scheme lends the works a quiet austerity. It reduces the work more or less to its essential elements without limiting it entirely to the purely formal. It is precisely this tension that opens up a space for associations, in which structure, materiality, and surface become carriers of memory. This unfolds an almost architectural presence reminiscent of the concrete of the prefabricated buildings and the art in architecture of his childhood. Graphically beautiful and changeable in form, arrangement, and aesthetics.
The connection to the structurally austere architectural order, the selected fragments from his childhood, and his memories run like a thread through his chosen interpretation of collage. Following the credo of minimal art, Schneider’s works unfold a quiet but powerful effect. The reduction to structure, geometry, and color creates a balancing act between stagnation and dynamism, between equilibrium and total energy overload, or between less and sometimes more.
