Works
The selection begins with Social Systems, Mehnert’s main field: participatory installations, social sculptures and public experiments on freedom, control and responsibility. Reference Systems and Perceptual Fields present the connected technical, spatial and material investigations.
Reference Systems
Reference Systems explores the often invisible structures through which we make sense of reality and orient ourselves within it. Coordinates, movement data and technological infrastructures are translated into line, light, image and space. The works give abstract relationships a sensory form and investigate how technical systems shape our perception and actions.
Beauty of Privacy
Movement profiles are translated into dense visual structures, revealing how personal data accumulates into collective form.
Data / Space / Light
Data to Light
Invisible data infrastructures are translated into a spatial system of light.
Light / Drawing / Space
Light Drawings
Drawn lines become walkable fields of colour, reflection and spatial perception.
Visual Spaces
Drawings, paintings, prints, and photographs in which landscape, materiality, gesture, and spatial order come to the fore.
Forest
Large scale charcoal drawings that transform landscape, density and observation into perceptual fields.
Drawing / Charcoal / Paper
Wood Systems
Charcoal drawings in which woodland structures turn into dense image systems of trunks, leaves and ground.
Works on Paper / Drawing
Works on Paper
Ink works, charcoal drawings and mixed media works on paper form a central material line in Mehnert's practice.
Painting / Canvas
Paintings
Painting is a material way of thinking through systems.
Etching / Overpainting
Overpainted Etchings
Printed lines and painterly interventions move between edition, gesture and unique image.
Large Drawings / 2026
Large Drawings
Large scale works in which density, rhythm and observation become fields of perception.
Woodcut / 1997
Aus einer Form
Woodcuts from 1997, reduced to form, print, placement and variation.
Analog Practice / Woodcut
Lockdown Woodcuts
Analog woodcuts of broken digital displays, creating a deliberate counter movement to digital image culture.
Social Systems
Social Systems is the main field of Florian Mehnert’s practice. Participatory installations, social sculptures and public experiments examine how technology, surveillance and collective behaviour shape freedom, privacy and responsibility.
Archive of Possible Lives
A walk-in archive where AI, drawers and printed fragments transform biography from truth into a field of probabilities.
Surveillance / Video InstallationHumantracks
A multi channel video installation examining smartphones as instruments of surveillance and the loss of privacy.
Social Experiment11 Days
Control, distance and participation become a radical experimental setting.
Public Space / Big DataFreedom 2.0
A participatory social sculpture on Big Data, freedom and the movement traces of citizens in public space.
Forest / SurveillanceWaldprotokolle
The forest, as the last remaining sanctuary, is under surveillance, revealing the fragility of privacy under constant observation.
Social Systems / Privacy / PhotographySmartphone Stacks
Photographic works addressing the privacy paradox and the transformation of people into data material.
Social Systems / Migration / PhotographyRefugee Stacks
A participatory photographic project on migration, postcolonial structures and the visibility of individual biographies.
Pandemic / Performance / Social DistanceSocial Distance Stacks
Ballett Stuttgart and Stuttgarter Philharmoniker become staged bodies of distance, vulnerability and collective presence.