Cottbus · Lusatia · Germany
Paint.
Symbols.
No Illusio.
Stev Varga is a self-taught painter, comic maker and trained bookbinder working out of Cottbus — a post-socialist, multicultural city he loves, needles and repaints. His mixed-media works in acrylic, coffee, cotton and found wood critique and reimagine social norms.
Seven bodies of work
Varga sorts his archive into series the way a bookbinder sorts signatures — each with its own spine. Every count below is a work photographed for Catalogue 01.
Xenoase
The heart of the archive — figures, flags and pictographic borders honouring African lives and the African diaspora in Lusatia.
Open series → 6Abstract
Layered mixed-media reliefs of canvas, carton, metal, glass and coffee, built up over years.
Open series → 4RedWhiteBlack
A restricted palette turned against itself — symbols Germans think they know, repainted until they ask questions back.
Open series → 5Inspired by
Studies after Heckel, Fetting, Womacka, Vogelsang and others, redrawn in Varga's own hand.
Open series → 1Science Fiction
Crystalline cities, comets and spiral galaxies in neon and metallic acrylic.
Open series → 2Comic
Pin-ups from the Labrats comic universe — drawn, painted, bound by hand.
Open series → 5Archive
Uncatalogued and in-progress works photographed in the studio.
Open series →
The artist
Stev Varga (b. 25 June 1978, Altdöbern) is a self-taught artist based in Cottbus, Germany. Trained as a bookbinder in individual and special production, he builds his paintings the way he binds books — layer over layer, stitched, glued, fixed — on canvas, paper, hemp and salvaged wood.
He has spent two decades passing the craft on: leading the Comic & Drawing group at the Sachsendorfer Oberschule twice a week since 2008, coaching at the Kunstfabrik in Spremberg, and since 2016 running a weekly open workshop at the Humi Youth Club.
His work questions how people read symbols — a peace sign Germans misread at first glance, a national flag repainted until it argues with itself — and how a post-socialist city looks at the strangers it lives with.
Acrylic · Coffee · Graphite · Cotton · Polyester · Carton · Glass · Metal · Found wood
Xenoase · Bamum Signs · Burned
An artistic tribute to African immigrants in Cottbus
The largest body of Varga's archive — the Xenoase series — honours African lives in Lusatia: portraits in graphite and coffee, Kenyan flags painted twice (once faithful, once argumentative), and canvases of hand-copied Bamum script, the alphabet invented in Cameroon under King Njoya around 1896.
The work is not decoration. BURNED writes out the names of Oury Jalloh, Christy Schwundeck and Laya Condé — people who died in German custody — over the words “and it happens again and again.”
Differences sets eight graphite portraits of Black men into crossword strips reading obviously · always · still · since birth of humankind. In a city where Varga estimates too many neighbours look away, the paintings look straight back.
Documented by Shahriyar Zarei Kasiri and Shubham Dogra in “Stev Varga's Artistic Tribute to African Immigrants in Cottbus”, Introduction to Critical Intercultural Studies (World Heritage Studies), BTU Cottbus–Senftenberg, Summer 2025, Prof. Dr. Tetiana Havlin.
Visits & enquiries
The studio archive can be visited by appointment. For works, commissions, workshops or exhibitions, get in touch.
Studio
Cottbus, Brandenburg, Germany
[ email coming soon ]
[ handle coming soon ]