Stefan Szczesny - Studio Visit
A winter morning in the Saint-Tropez atelier
The studio sits on the Saint-Tropez peninsula, among pines and palms a short walk from the sea. Szczesny has lived here since 2001 and opened this large studio in 2010. Tall windows run the length of the room, and in winter the low Mediterranean light falls straight across the floor onto whatever he is working on.
In January, with the summer crowds long gone, we spent a morning in Stefan Szczesny's studio in Saint-Tropez: a white, light-filled hall where paintings, ceramics, steel and surfboards share one room.
That morning it was a large canvas fixed flat to the wall: four fields of pink, yellow, mint and sky blue, drawn over in quick black and red line. He works seated on a low stool, close to the surface, brush in one hand and a pot of paint at his feet. The floor beneath him is spattered with years of colour.
Szczesny was born in Munich in 1951 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. In 1981 he organised Rundschau Deutschland, the exhibition that introduced the Neue Wilde, the young painters who brought colour and the figure back into German painting. Saint-Tropez gave that energy its subject: the sea, gardens, palms, bathers and the light of the south.
The studio shows how far that language travels. The walls are hung edge to edge with recent canvases. Black steel shadow sculptures, a form he has made since 2005, stand among them, alongside painted ceramic vases, a red coral tree and surfboards painted on both sides. Stacks of catalogues on the worktable record five decades of exhibitions.
Many motifs move from one material to the next. A face drawn in a few lines on paper reappears on a vase, then as a cut-out figure in steel. Leaves become a pattern on a board. A silhouette with a heart cut through it becomes a sculpture in orange or red lacquer, standing among the palms outside.
The garden is part of the studio. Coloured steel figures stand between agaves, cacti and palms, and in summer the space opens up for evenings with friends and collectors, as at the studio cocktail in July 2025. Further afield, his sculptures stand in public places around the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, among them a monumental figure on a roundabout in Grimaud.
In 2020 Stefan and Eva Szczesny set up the Szczesny Art Foundation Saint-Tropez to preserve and research the work, with plans for a museum and sculpture park in the town. The studio itself is open to visitors by appointment.
Szczesny turns 75 this year, but nothing in the studio felt like a retrospective. When we left, the canvas from the morning was still on the wall, unfinished, waiting for the next session.
Works from the Studio
A selection of Stefan Szczesny's paintings, works on paper and sculpture is available through Anton Szczesny Fine Art.Get in touch to arrange a private viewing or to ask about a specific work.
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