Making-of calendar

We start the week with bare facts and show you how artistic and sensual recycling and waste can be. In 2019, we started the year with a very special calendar - The Art of STORK. Professional body painting artist Johannes Stötter skillfully staged our range of services in a sophisticated, erotic way, blurring reality and illusion. This resulted in impressive works between brick rubble, railroad sleepers and aluminum, combinations of man and machine on our mobile plants as well as fascinating landscape shots on our slag and FE mountains.

The calendar was created in collaboration with the agency Buff.media from Magdeburg, the body painting artist Johannes Stötter and the photographer Hanna Uhlmann.

He had been painting for some time and hadn't even been aware that body painting existed, Johannes Stötter tells us during a break in our calendar production. He had discovered it for himself when he got off the canvas and realized that you can transform or integrate people's bodies into works of art.

Johannes is a calm, focused and modest person. He grew up as one of 3 children in a family of musicians in South Tyrol. He began making music at an early age. He studied education and philosophy in Innsbruck. But at some point he discovered painting for himself. Bodies became canvases and Stötter developed his very own body painting technique. Vice World Champion 2011 and 2014, World Champion 2012, Italian Champion 2011 and 2013, winner of the North American Bodypainting Championship in the USA 2013 and winner of the "International Fine Art Bodypainting Award" in 2014 are just some of the titles he has won. Stötter appears on TV shows around the world and videos of his projects are constantly circulating virally on social networks. His paintings of wolves, frogs and fish, each composed of several painted people, have become world-famous. "I don't want people to look at my work, nod and then never think about it again," he tells us in an interview.

But Johannes doesn't give us the impression that he is looking for fame and the limelight. He is undoubtedly a rock star in the art world, but that doesn't seem to interest him at all. On the first day of production at Stork's premises in Magdeburg, we expect to see at least one van full of compressors, airbrush technology and perhaps a pretentious artist. We had agreed with his agency that he would bring everything with him. Everything a world champion could possibly need. When Johannes and his two models arrive, he has a small, well-worn suitcase with him. Nothing more. Everything is in there. The suitcase is only half full. With a small, paint-smeared aluminum beauticase, an equally smudged digital camera and his painting clothes. That's all he needs. We're not sure if that's enough. Airbrush? He only paints with a brush. I see. And a coffee? Yes, he'd take that too, if it's no trouble.

The first motif will be a camouflage body painting on a pile of broken bricks. Camouflage means that the painted model seems to merge completely with its surroundings. Johannes unpacks his paints on a specially procured camping table and installs an old laptop with a small loudspeaker. Music is important to him. He finishes his hand-rolled cigarette and ties a formerly white cloth around his forehead. Then he carefully starts some weird electronic music on his laptop and immerses himself in his motif.

The observations over the course of the week show us that the headband is the ritual door to the exit from our world. Everything around him no longer takes place, he is absolutely focused. And begins to paint. Routinely, focused, precise. The model and he are a well-rehearsed team. He hardly moves at all for the next hour. He paints with concentration, as if it were a heart operation. Or a world champion in body painting. Later, he takes photos to check the illusion he has created. At some point, his tension eases. "I think that's so good," he says calmly and smiles. He has just returned to our world. The final calendar page can be made.

We were able to get photographer Hanna Uhlmann to take the photos. It was important for this project that the art form of photography was subordinate to Stötter's painting, but without being incidental. That the photography should be sensitive to the subject. Hanna, who had to leave the set every now and then to breastfeed her young son at home, did this job perfectly. Johannes and she quickly became a well-rehearsed team. The week flew by with one of the most extraordinary projects of our lives. Johannes paints from dawn to dusk. He shows no signs of wear and tear, neither physically nor in his passion, despite the 35 °C in the shade that we all have to contend with. The temperature is probably just as absent from his world as passing vehicles on a set, which we have to protect him from. This creates unique motifs. Even on the day when the country's interior minister and his delegation visit the company. Officials from the LKA also check the security of our location in the mechanical engineering hall, while Stötter is transforming the model into a cyborg. The combination of man and machine that only exists in science fiction films. Johannes probably didn't notice anything about the LKA either.

In the preliminary planning, we were a little worried that we would wear out the artist with a calendar production of 13 motifs in one week. That at some point we would run out of steam and the art would degenerate into commissioned painting, the job would just be finished and that would be that. That didn't happen, because the exceptional artist Johannes Stötter probably wouldn't let that happen either. You don't become world champion just like that.

www.johannesstoetterart.com