MAXIMILIAN PRÜFER. From dust you shall return

What happens when images are not painted, but read by flies? And when history is not narrated, but continues to work through the dust of its own destruction?
The film about Maximilian Prüfer follows an artist who works with living beings, materials, and extended timeframes — and who understands art not as the production of forms, but as the making visible of processes.

Prüfer’s works are created in collaboration with natural agents: flies, light, heat, pigments, time. In a precisely constructed setup, the insects leave traces on paper — small dots that at first appear random, but gradually condense into images. Where the flies place their marks is not decided by the artist alone, but by temperature, sunlight, material, and movement. The image emerges from a complex interplay of environment, biology, and structure.

Behind this poetic method lies a deeper historical layer. The pigments with which Prüfer feeds the flies are made from bomb rubble from the Second World War — from the ruins of Augsburg. History here is not illustrated, but materially present: as crushed city, as sedimented violence, as substance. And at the same time, as the starting point for a radical reversal.

With these works, Prüfer reconstructs images that were destroyed by the National Socialists as “degenerate art.” Destruction, he says, is the opposite of creation. His work intervenes precisely at this point: not to simply reproduce what was lost, but to continue the cycle of annihilation and creation — and to redirect it. What was once erased slowly returns. First as noise. Then as outlines. Finally as an image.

This process takes time. Some works develop over months, others over years. Patience here is not a means to an end, but part of the work’s meaning. The images do not appear at the push of a button — they grow, they take shape, they re-emerge. And with them comes the possibility of not only remembering history, but renegotiating it.

In the film, Maximilian Prüfer also speaks about his own path: about a childhood without easy access to art or museums, about curiosity as a driving force, and about art as a space where philosophy, society, research, technology, and aesthetics are allowed to intersect — not as finished answers, but as open-ended thinking.

Receiving the STRABAG ART Award International 2025 does not mark an endpoint, but a moment within a long-term artistic process — a practice less concerned with producing quick images than with allowing things to slowly become visible.

The film invites viewers to witness this unusual process of creation: a becoming that cannot be controlled — and that, precisely because of this, tells us something about our relationship to history, destruction, and hope.

From January 16 to February 19, 2026, STRABAG ART presents the artist’s work under the title "Ein Bild findet Gnade" (An Image Finds Grace).

https://strabag.art/

Interviewee: Maximilian Prüfer
Artworks by: Maximilian Prüfer

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German
Subtitles: English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Helmut Feier, Wolfgang Haas, Melvin Urregg, Michael Rottmann,
Production country: Austria, Vienna