Stan Back

The artist Stan Back disappeared six years ago in Costa Rica. The American cultural scholar Jules Beauregard found documents on the artist's laptop, enabling a reconstruction of the art and life of Stan Back. 

Stan Back was a German artist, born around 1965, probably in a small village near Ceske Budejovice, former Czechoslovakia. He was adopted by German parents and grew up near Frankfurt where he studied art. Stan Back later moved to Berlin and since young years frequently travelled to New York and Los Angeles, working there as an assistant to artists and musicians. Travelling has been one of his main passions and he used to be a real globe trotter.

The oeuvre of Stan Back includes drawings, photographs, videos, music and texts. But most of it has been lost or has been consciously destroyed by Stan Back. Since the 90s, Stan Back grew increasingly suspicious of the art scene's development. He scented a strong auto-censorship and commercial streamlining within the art world and felt himself being ill placed and lost as an artist. Since the late 90s he resigned from public appearances as an artist. This refusal and disappearing being his answer to the art scene as he perceived it.

On the evening of December 31, 2008, Stan Back did not return to his hotel room in Santa Theresa in Costa Rica. Jules Beauregard spent the last days with him and at first unsuspiciously thought that Stan Back is still suffering somewhere from a heavy hangover. However, Stan Back did not return.

→ Jules Beauregard on Stan Back

→ Reading Artists

→ Reading Artists