about
Franz Leonard Elfert, born in 1998 in Neuenbürg, Germany, lives and works as an artist in Stuttgart. From 2019 to 2026 he studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, where he joined the class of Prof. Ricarda Roggan in 2020.
Taking photography as its point of departure, his work addresses the relationship between digitality and materiality, the evidentiary status of documentary images, and moments in which the image takes the place of bodily presence. The medium follows from the question at hand, and time and again the process itself becomes the subject of the work.
In 162 × 130 Pixel (2023), shown at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, he transfers a photograph reduced to 162 × 130 picture points onto muslin by hand, using potato prints. Stepping closer brings the viewer no closer to the person depicted; instead, the portrait breaks down into its pixels. In untitled (estaciones radioeléctricas camuflajeadas) (2023) he documents cell towers in Mexico disguised as plants. The series records this artificial phenomenon through equally artificial means: every image was created with generative AI. CAPTCHA (2025) refers to the verification test of the same name, in which people must, paradoxically, prove to a machine that they are not machines. Sixteen cyanotypes on felt show a raised middle finger, a gesture whose very affect marks it as human. As imprints of light in the fabric, they supply the bodily proof the machine demands and withhold it at the same time.
For all their formal differences, the works move within a shared contemporary field of inquiry.
