NINA STOELTING'S ART OF FUGUE

Nina Stoelting’s new series of paintings constitutes a paragone: a dialogue—not to say a contest—between painting and music, bound together in a profoundly existential interplay.

The term paragone refers to the historic rivalry awithin the arts. Already in Greek and Roman antiquity, this debate was carried out with both passion and intellectual rigor. Arguments were advanced to determine the position of each artistic medium in relation to other art forms. Was sculpture superior because it occupied space? Or was painting more elevated because it could suggest sculptured bodies on a two dimensional surface? Was music the highest art, capable of reaching the soul yet unfolding in time? Or was it painting, which could be grasped at once, in a single instantaneous perception?

As with any longstanding familial dispute, the debate was often intense—and did not end with antiquity. Both the Early Modern and Modernist periods and returned repeatedly to this question, for the moment one seeks to define the relationship between the arts, one inevitably confronts their most fundamental nature—the very heart of artistic creation.

Nina Stoelting’s engagement with music owes much, albeit indirectly, to the pianist Sir András Schiff, whom she greatly admires. In 2013, she attended one of his master classes at London’s Wigmore Hall. Immersed in Beethoven’s piano sonatas, she found herself asking: “Can this be transported into painting? Can these bodies of sound be transformed into the two-dimensional, visually perceptible medium of painting?” In this way, Schiff’s playing placed Nina Stoelting at the center of a paragone—one that proved fruitful, even if nearly a decade of reflection and experimentation would pass before it crystallized into form.

Only in 2021, during one of her many residency fellowships, did her first ink works on paper emerge—responding to string quartets from the Classical period through Late Romanticism. These works appear under the title Capriccio, denoting the intentional, playful transgression of artistic rules. This thematic thread continues to weave through her work today.

Given that Nina Stoelting’s artistic oeuvre consistently revolves around structures, it is unsurprising that she became captivated by one of the monumental achievements of Western music: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of Fugue. Composed in the 1740s, left unfinished, and published in 1751, the work comprises fourteen fugues (Contrapunctus) and four canons, all derived from a single musical theme. A milestone of compositional craft, it has been performed by many distinguished musicians—on harpsichord, piano, organ, as a string quartet, and in countless other instrumental configurations. Nina Stoelting’s deep engagement with the Art of Fugue consisted not only in listening, but in comparative listening, score study, historical inquiry, and sustained intellectual contemplation of what András Schiff has called a Bachian “world wonder”. For each of the fourteen fugues she created a monumental canvas, each standing 2.20 meters high and 1.50 meters wide—an expansive fourteen part cycle.

Music generates an inner movement, a stirring of the soul in response to what is heard. Yet this inner motion also presses outward—into the movement of the body. One might initially imagine the artist becoming a kind of ‘dancer’ while listening to Bach in her studio. But this would be reductive. The inward motion that flows into the outer gesture of the body culminates in the movement of the brush, yet Nina Stoelting’s painting is not a choreography following the temporal course of the music. Quite the contrary. She undertakes a condensation that must lie beyond temporality. In the pivotal moment of creation, all prior intellectual and technical preparation falls away as she listens profoundly, immersing herself in the movement of sound. The groundwork remains present but recedes, allowing the lived experience of the music to be felt as imagination on a higher plane. Thus each brushstroke can express an aspect of the work’s characteristic whole—not by imitating a phrase heard in the studio, but by distilling the essence of the musical structure. In Nina Stoelting’s hands, bodies of sound become bodies of space.

As support, Nina Stoelting uses large canvases meticulously prepared with six layers of tinted gesso—applied and sanded repeatedly until a smooth, absorbent, homogeneous surface emerges. She tints the gesso not with plain white but with a tone—“warm, living silence,” as she describes it.

These canvases are placed flat on the studio floor. To apply color, she uses not traditional brushes but materials drawn from the plant world. The primal and life-filled forces of nature have long been central to her practice. Her use of authentic natural materials began in 2001 with Le goût de la terre, a work that explored the terroir of vineyard landscapes. Later cycles deepened this dialogue: in Unser täglich Brot gib uns heute (2019/20), she used wheat straws and ears as brushes; in Partitur des Windes, she experimented with willow and juniper twigs, oak leaves, and linden blossoms. Her study of wind movements ultimately became the key to translating musical rhythm into painterly gesture. It is therefore natural that, in Capriccio and in her Art of Fugue cycle, she again employs plants as painting tools. Her preferred ‘brush’ is the leaf of the evergreen Prague viburnum — a sturdy, tapered leaf with pronounced veins and a softly felted underside. She uses it as a ‘brush tip’ by attaching two leaves, placed back to back with the undersides facing outward, to the end of a long, flat wooden stick. For broader strokes, she employs the cut surfaces of balsa wood. With these handmade natural tools, Nina Stoelting applied four colors of ink corresponding to Bach’s four interacting voices—white, ochre, blue, and black—rendering baroque polyphony visually palpable.

As noted earlier, Nina Stoelting is far from the first artist to explore the relationship between music and painting. This dialogue intensified at the dawn of Modernism, when the immaterial, non-representational nature of music profoundly influenced the avant garde. Many visual artists viewed contemporary musical innovations as more advanced in abstraction. Wassily Kandinsky, whose synesthesia shaped his artistic vision, felt that pure painterly means could act as directly upon the soul as music—especially that of Arnold Schoenberg. “Colour is the keyboard, the eye is the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings,” Kandinsky wrote in 1912 in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

All art demands active participation—something less self evident today, when luminous screens tempt us into passive consumption. To perceive art, however, is to engage inwardly, to take something as true through active attention.

Nina Stoelting’s works invite precisely this mode of perception. They must be experienced. One must follow the ductus of the brushstroke, the dynamism of the forms, the resonance of their colours. Her gestures are mostly short and concise, rarely elongated—four colors, four voices in a kind of dance. At times one gesture leads, at times another. A duet emerges, then an echo in a different register. Mirrored moments appear—some near, others spanning wide distances across the surface. One senses tone sequence, rhythm, timbre—their repetition, escalation, transformation, inversion, counterpointing, and fading resonance.

These painterly rhythmic gestures emerge from the intangible spatiality of the luminous ground. The pictorial field concentrates inward; its edges dissolve into spatial infinity—within and beyond the canvas. Time also enters the visual experience, despite the apparent simultaneity, for her brushwork is subtly nuanced: delicate here, assertive there, overlapping, permeating, replacing one another. The colors do not all lie on a single plane; some are partially veiled by gesso, disappearing into or emerging from the background. Everything seems to flow in continuous evolving and dissolving—a weaving in time. Through this approach, the movements of sound become perceptible not only all at once, but also successively.

Each canvas becomes a sound form through which the artist allows the respective Contrapunctus to express itself visually. Each is complete in itself; together, the fourteen form a resonant whole. Nina Stoelting succeeds in making Bach’s polyphony visible. The particular strength of her work lies in the transformation of sound space into pictorial space—and in the way this pictorial language transforms back into sound within the viewer’s experience. These works reward genuine attentiveness: those who behold them become listeners through sight—and hear through seeing.


Dr. Andreas Henning
Director, Museum Wiesbaden
Hessian State Museum of Art and Nature

(Excerpt from the opening address for the exhibition Art of Fugue by Nina Stoelting at the Kronberg Academy, March 2026.)