Keiyona C. Stumpf

Keiyona C. Stumpf (b. 1982) is a German artist whose work over the past eight years has primarily focused on ceramics and porcelain. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Her artistic practice explores the richness of natural forms and the processes that create and transform them. Inspired by organic structures, her work combines familiar elements with an otherworldly strangeness, evoking a sense of beauty and liveliness while delving into deeper emotional layers.

Keiyona has received numerous awards, including the Bavarian Award for Applied Arts (2018), the Art Awards from the County of Augsburg and Art Association Aichach (both 2017), the Exam Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (2011), the BMW Brilliance Art Award in Shenyang, China (2011), and the Fanny Carlita Award from the Fanny Carlita Foundation, Munich (2005). Her projects have been supported by grants such as the Visual Arts Scholarship of the City of Munich (2016) and a residency scholarship from the Alexander Tutsek Foundation at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, USA (2018).

Keiyona’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including at Keramion Frechen, Galleria Antonella Villanova (Firenze), Hengevoss-Duerkop Gallery (Hamburg), Art Association Rosenheim, European Museum for Modern Glass (Coburg), Museum Schloss Fürstenberg, Art Association Hechingen, Art Association Munich, EIGEN + ART Lab (Berlin), Haus der Kunst (Munich), and Galerie Handwerk Munich.

She has also participated in major international art fairs such as Design Miami/Basel, NOMAD St. Moritz, and Art Vienna, among others. Her works are part of notable public and private collections, including the Goetz Collection, with acquisitions through the benefit auction PIN.FOR Art for the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. In 2021, her porcelain installation was acquired by the Porzellanikon State Museum of Porcelain in Selb, Germany.

Visit Keiyona C. Stumpf’s website and Instagram page.

The infinite repertoire of natural phenomena, their inherent conformity to laws and their forces of growth and decay are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me.
In an organic/abstract vocabulary of forms, I endeavor to make the essence of being alive tangible. Order and chaos, as original principles of life, form a starting point for both form and content. Alien yet strangely familiar-seeming forms experience diverse metamorphoses in my sculptures and installations or find their subtle balance between stability and instability in round, flowing silhouettes.
Guided by feeling and intuition, I allow the works to grow from an interplay of concrete ideas and reactions to random changes in the making process itself. Thus, the works always seem driven by an inner dynamic, and their potential for change is inherent. They should not be understood as merely imitating nature but rather as expressing individual experience and interpretation of natural principles and laws. They play with the viewer’s sense of beauty and question the individual norms and presets of one’s own perceptions.
The naturally beautiful is not regarded as something perfect here but as an expression of a creative process that is able to touch our own realities to connect us with the most fundamental principles of our existence.
Ultimately, humankind and nature do not stand separate from each other as a pair of opposites. Nature is not only the basis of our existence; we are “nature” and bear all its principles in us. Through my works, I hope to speak to this uplifting sense of aliveness in some of us and thus to re-pose the question of beauty, dynamism, and change.