STEFAN KNAUF | AS HOPE IS LAST TO DIE

Livie Gallery is proud to announce the first solo show at the gallery with Berlin-based artist Stefan Knauf, opening on the occasion of Zurich Art Weekend in June. During Zurich Art Weekend just before Liste and Art Basel, June 12-14, the gallery will be open all weekend.

Hope has accompanied us ever since we have been able to imagine a future. It is not a modern invention but an anthropological constant — a quiet, often contradictory force running through myths, religions, political move-ments, and artistic expression. But why do we hope?

Hope is less a feeling than a particular way of orienting oneself toward the future. It arises where the present is experienced as insufficient without being considered closed. Embedded within it is the assumption that what is, is not all there is. This assumption is neither certain nor inevitable — more a posture we adopt in order not to remain fixed in what already exists. Especially in a time marked by crises and wars, where certainty erodes and political as well as ecological orders begin to falter, this attitude gains in weight. Not as a solution, but as the precondition for continuing to think at all. Hope shifts the gaze. It allows us to carry on, even when much remains unclear. It operates within the indeterminate, without resolving it. Therein lies its power — less in what it promises than in what it leaves open. It enables action in the face of uncertainty, engagement without any guarantee of success. At the same time, it carries within it a moment of excess: a not-yet that points beyond what is given and makes change imaginable in the first place.

Hope does not only keep possibilities open — it also holds onto them. Expectations persist even when their foundations have become fragile. Conditions endure even after they have long begun to waver. What promises movement can slide into a kind of stasis. In the works of Stefan Knauf, precisely this tension crystallises: resistance and rigidity converge, persistence tips into standstill.

At times, hope appears as a promise of individual agency, as a narrative of permanent self-optimisation. Everything seems attainable, provided sufficient effort is made. In this, the gaze shifts imperceptibly — away from structural conditions and toward individual responsibility. Openness becomes expectation; possibility becomes demand. Yet sometimes hope operates more quietly. Almost imperceptibly. As the soothing notion that things will work out. That solutions are already taking shape. That others will intervene. In this shift, a sense of relief emerges — and, simultaneously, a sense of distance. The urgency remains, but loses its sharpness.

Hope is not a straightforward state. It is a field of tension. It opens up room for action — and blocks it at the same time. It can expand perspectives — and bind us to outdated ideas. Not every hope sustains, not every hope opens onto the future. It cannot simply be preserved without also examining what it is tied to. Against this backdrop, the idea that hope is last to die seems less a consolation than a remark on its persistence. It endures — even where it has long since become questionable. It does not disappear before us, but only with us. Therein lies its peculiar intimacy: it accompanies us, right up to an end that is not its own.

Marlene Marti Bürgi

Read the German version of the exhibition text here.