• Special exhibition "Stefan Draschan. 11 seconds" as part of the photography festival of the StädteRegion Aachen from August 24 to November 9, 2025
  
  
• Artist Talk with Stefan Draschan and curator Sarvenaz Ayooghi
  for the Open House Day - season opener 2025/2026 at SLM on Saturday, September 13 at 6 p.m. and
  "Photograph like Stefan Draschan: Find your doppelganger in art!",
  Guided tours on Open House Day at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. on the subject of photography
  
  
• At the end of the exhibition: Artist Talk with Stefan Draschan and curator Sarvenaz Ayooghi on Friday, November 7 at 6 p.m.
  
  

Born in Austria in 1979, photographer Stefan Draschan is a reliable museum visitor who travels to many European museums. The current show at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum presents 22 of his works and is the first solo exhibition of his work in an art museum.

Stefan Draschan spends hours in the often magnificent museum halls and is very familiar with the collections. An art connoisseur who follows a hunting instinct with his camera with one goal: to find the perfect pair of pictures.

In his fascinating snapshots, he combines people with masterpieces from European museums, whose clothing, gestures or hairstyles harmonize with the exhibits in an astonishing way. In his "People Matching Artworks" series, which has become internationally renowned on social networks, he shows matching pairs of images, allowing the past and present to merge, thus completely redefining what it means to see and be seen. His works are surrounded by a special aura, for example when people lose themselves in the golden grounds of medieval panel painting or the light dramaturgy of a collection room allows the backs of heads to become part of the image carrier. Irony always plays an important role here.

Stefan Draschan is not only a photographer with an excellent sense for concise compositions, but also an artist whose working method is comparable to that of the great masters. He paints with his camera by creating new compositions, continuing them or adding lines, folds or postures, as in Dürer's "Praying Mary" in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin. As in a trompe-l'oeil painting, the illusionistic deception of the eye is only revealed at second glance. The man standing in front of the painting in the typical stooped posture of "label reading" is only discovered on closer inspection.

A special feature among the "People Matching Artworks" photographs is the shot in front of Paolo Veronese's (1528-1588) "Marriage at Cana" in the Louvre in Paris. Here, the faces of the crowds of visitors are clearly visible and, due to their large number, can no longer be distinguished from the figures in the monumental masterpiece in the background. The Italian artist Veronese placed no fewer than 130 people on the canvas, all with different faces, gestures and gazes. You look for them in the crowd and then ask yourself where everyone is looking if not at the imposing work of art. The attention is focused solely on the Mona Lisa, which is exhibited in the same room and surrounded by great painters such as Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. But all these virtuoso paintings are lost in complete insignificance and are barely given a glance. With this photograph, Stefan Draschan demonstrates what can be observed in many renowned museums: we only see what seems familiar to us, everything else is often secondary and not worthy of a picture. This is precisely where Draschan's artistic finesse comes in. His sense for the decisive moment, the moment décisif, to use Henri Cartier-Bresson's words, makes his photographs as unique as the short average time he has to take a picture: 11 seconds.

The exhibition is part of the photography festival of the StädteRegion Aachen. From 24.08. to 21.09.2025, various exhibitions, talks, workshops and events on the subject of photography will take place throughout the region for four weeks. Around 100 internationally and regionally renowned photographers* can be seen at 16 exhibition venues in Monschau, Aachen, Eschweiler and Maastricht, with a total of 800 works. Stefan Draschan's photographs will be on display in the museum's fireplace room until November 9. An accompanying catalog will be available during the festival for 7.00 euros.

Kuratorin: Sarvenaz Ayooghi

Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum

Wilhelmstr. 18, 52070 Aachen

Phone: +49 241 47980-40

Fax: +49 241 37075

info@suermondt-ludwig-museum.de

www.suermondt-ludwig-museum.de