.ART Award Submission
This submission focuses on one specific artwork by Fabian Seifried aka KUNSTWILD:
R.I.P. (Rest in Pink)
The following sections provide the artist identity, technical details, and conceptual story behind the work.
The artist
Fabian Seifried, working under the name KUNSTWILD, lives and works in Munich. His artistic practice moves between object art, sculpture, and the contemporary transformation of traditional trophy culture. He works with real animal objects, primarily skulls, antlers, and horns, which he transforms into new three-dimensional visual spaces through lacquer, acrylic, metallic surfaces, glitter particles, reflections, and ornamental interventions.
Seifried’s artistic path did not follow a purely academic route, but developed from a background in design, media, international visual culture, and a steadily growing exhibition practice. Raised in southern Germany, he was shaped early on by classical modernism, surrealism, and later by contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst. Equally important are memories of alpine landscapes, hunting rooms, and animal trophies. In his work, these references are not continued nostalgically, but critically reexamined and transformed. After exploring product design and sculpture, he studied media economics with a focus on media design and media management at Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in Cologne. This combination of design, visual communication, and conceptual thinking continues to inform his artistic language.
After more than ten years in Southeast Asia, Seifried developed his distinct artistic voice in Munich. His works explore the relationship between humans and animals, nature and culture, memory, beauty, and transience. From former trophies, found objects, and relics, he creates silent counterparts: contemporary object portraits that make the human gaze upon nature visible.
Seifried regularly presents his work at art fairs, galleries, art associations, and exhibition venues across Germany and Europe, including ArtMUC, ARTe Konstanz, INC art fair Bodensee, Kunsthalle Kempten, Schloss Schwetzingen, Galerie Kleiner Prinz Baden-Baden, and art3F Strasbourg. His works are held in private collections in London, Singapore, Tokyo, and other locations.
The story
The works of Fabian Seifried, alias KUNSTWILD, exist at the intersection of nature, memory, and transformation. By using animal skulls and antlers, he places forms once created by nature into a new context, allowing them to continue to exist beyond their original existence. His artistic practice is characterized by a deep respect for life and an awareness of the fragile continuity that connects all living things.
The materials used are objets trouvés, found objects that were not created but discovered, bearing traces of time and past existence. Rather than concealing these qualities, Seifried highlights them, thereby following an aesthetic reminiscent of the principle of wabi-sabi, in which beauty lies in transience and imperfection.
Through refinement and gentle transformation, often incorporating reflective or metallized surfaces, each work is transformed from a relic into a presence. The works invite contemplation and encourage us to reflect on our relationship to nature, to transience, and to the cycles of existence.
A key example of this approach is R.I.P. (Rest in Pink). The work is based on a real mouflon skull, an object traditionally associated with strength, masculinity, death, and archaic natural force. Seifried deliberately shifts this symbolism through a precise visual transformation: the horns are lacquered in luminous pink, while the skull is held in deep black with chrome accents. What once appeared hard, dark, and martial is moved into a new field of meaning, between softness, elegance, pop culture, and quiet irony.
Pink, often associated with femininity, tenderness, and contemporary visual culture, stands in conscious contrast to the forceful presence of the animal skull. At the same time, the black chrome surface creates a reflective skin. It mirrors the viewer and turns the object into an image of the present, one in which old ideas of power, possession, gender, and identity are questioned.
The title Rest in Pink plays with the familiar phrase “Rest in Peace.” Instead of presenting death as silence or closure, the work proposes transformation as a form of continued presence. It becomes an ironic yet respectful farewell to inherited symbols of dominance, and at the same time a vivid, almost theatrical gesture of renewal. In R.I.P., death does not disappear. It is transformed into color, reflection, elegance, and a new kind of life.
The Work / Technical Details
Medium: Objet trouvé / sculpture / mixed media
Materials: Real mouflon skull and horns, silver layered metallized Argentum in black chrome finish on the skull, and luminous pink on the horns, metal stand
Dimensions: Skull: 30 × 36 × 26 cm; incl. stand: 52 × 36 × 26 cm
Tools/software: Hand-finished analog process; no digital tools or software used
