His Story

Stev Varga was born in 1978 in Altdöbern, a small town in Lusatia where the land itself keeps being rewritten — villages moved, pits dug, lakes made. Maybe that is where it starts: he has never trusted a surface to stay the way it was given to him.

Nobody taught him to paint. He taught himself, the long way — comics first, drawn panel by panel and then bound by hand, because in 2004 he trained as a bookbinder, in individual and special production. That craft never left his work. Look closely at his canvases and you find a binder's habits everywhere: cotton and polyester stitched over carton, layers glued and fixed and sewn, paintings built the way books are built — to be opened again and again, and to hold.

He paints with whatever carries meaning: acrylic, graphite, ink — and coffee, poured and stained into hemp paper until the ground itself looks like memory. Glass, metal, salvaged wood. A painting by Varga is rarely just a picture; it is an object with a body.

The teacher

For nearly twenty years, Stev has given the craft away as fast as he learned it. Since 2008 he has led the Comic & Drawing group at the Sachsendorfer Oberschule, twice a week, school year after school year. He worked as a Creative Coach at the Kunst.Fabrik in Cottbus and at IBP Spremberg — comic, drawing, graffiti — painting murals with his groups, running workshops in hospitals, drawing with children at market days, and since 2016 keeping a weekly open evening at the Humi Youth Club.

Half of Cottbus has, at some point, sat at a table while Stev walked around it saying: draw it the way you see it, not the way they told you it looks.

The walls

Before the canvases there were walls. Graffiti and brush, spray can and scaffold — murals in youth clubs, schools, courtyards; a Madonna on a house wall one month, a jungle full of animals the next. In 2012 he turned the grey equipment shed of a Peitz nursery into a bright landscape for the children — the kind of quiet public work the local paper still noticed. The walls made him quick and public; the bookbinding made him slow and precise. The paintings in the archive are what happens when both hands work at once.

The room where it happens

His studio is a working room and an open door. People come to talk as much as to look; painting happens between conversations. When researchers from BTU Cottbus spent time there in 2025, they called it “a dynamic cultural hub, community meeting point, and safe space” — and its very existence “an act of performative resilience in Cottbus.” You can read what else they found on the research page.

What he believes

“Art is action.”

Nothing in the archive is for sale. But everyone is invited to say what a work would be worth to them — honestly, anonymously, publicly. That is the deal Stev offers his city: he shows everything, and you say what it means to you.