Painting by Sebastian Bieniek
Sebastian Bieniek is an artist who started his career in the anarchist art-scene of the Post-reunification Berlin's Kunsthaus Tacheles in 1998.
He then studied art by the Joseph Beuys student Prof. Katharina Sieverding at the UdK Berlin and so he's a kind of second generation Beuys student who understands art as a subversive political statement.
Bieniek exaggerates, criticizes, and employs irony, pushing current global events to the extreme in order to make them visible—and usually to transform them into an image that he then calls his art.
His central themes are ambivalence and ambiguity—which he views as concomitants of the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world—situated within today’s "post-truth" landscape: a world that no longer recognizes a single truth and where multiple narratives exist for everything.
The culmination of this artistic engagement—spanning thirty years to date—is the staging of death and resurrection by Bieniek himself in 2022 as an artistic statement on post-truth reality.
Bieniek works with painting,
conceptual art and
photography .
NEWS 2026 (II)
2026/11 (No. 38 of all)
Paintings from the famous 111 Faces Series by Sebastian Bieniek now availabe on artpeers.de
oct. 10th, 2026
„Face no. 2“, by Sebastian Bieniek, 2016. Oil on canvas. 30 x 24 cm. From the "Face 1-9" series of „111 Faces“ oeuvre.
"Face No. 2" is the second painting from the well-known "111 Faces" series by the Berlin-based artist Sebastian Bieniek (b. 1975), who is internationally renowned for his portraits.
This gesturally executed painting depicts a portrait rendered with great expressiveness. Rather than portraying a specific individual, the artist focuses on capturing expressions—and thus expressiveness itself. He seeks to grasp character as a fleeting moment and to present it stripped of the everyday mask we all wear.
Thus, the 111 portraits in the series represent an act of liberation by the artist and through art.
Painted in 2016, the work is characterized by a thick, gestural application of paint, lending it a somewhat modeled, sculptural quality. It appears as though the face, its expression, and the paint application merge into a single, harmonious form.
LINK TO ARTPEERS ART AUCTIONS...
2026/10 (No. 37 of all)
The Priest Portrait That is after
125 years now more alive than ever
june. 16th, 2026
A priest whose face is expanded and simultaneously united by another face. Instead of being lost in this unnatural constellation, the opposite occurs. The eyes are more focused, and the figure is more present. One has the impression that the person only found themselves through the second face and only thereby became what they are. A mystical fascination emanates from the painting "Threeeye No. 5" by Sebastian Bieniek. Painted in 1901 as a classic realistic portrait, the picture is now a masterpiece that is no longer merely a portrait of a person, but rather of their soul. Bieniek seems to be able to recognize and coax out the soul not only of his paintings. In 2024, the painting was included in the Two-Faced series and given the name "Two-Faced No. 9.
See more from the series...
„Threeeye No. 5“ by Sebastian Bieniek, 2014. Overpainted old painting (oil on canvas) from 1901. 60 cm. x 47 cm. (overpainted medium, here an old painting) from the oeuvre of BieniekFace (Bieniek-Face) by the artist. Since 2024 also titeled "Two-Faced No. 9"
In the 2014 painting „The Guardian Angel“ (also titled *Facination No. 9*) by Sebastian Bieniek, a figure that appears to be from another world places its arm around another figure; together, they merge into an aura-like form that becomes part of the background. This evokes the Russian word for the soul, *dusha*—a term that links the soul with air (or "ether," as it would have been called before the concept of "nothingness" was invented) and everything related to air, as well as with the spirit and the breath. It is not without reason that Bieniek is regarded as the painter of the soul—an artist who seeks to visualize and depict things that are otherwise invisible to the eye. Do fate, predestination, spirits, and guardian angels exist? The answer seems to lie hidden within Bieniek’s paintings.
See more similar paintings... (click)