As a celebrated visual technician of criticism of civilisation, Torsten Slama has always sought to engage with the public. The artist is one of the most important protagonists of a generation whose intellectuality helped to shape the change of artscene from Cologne to Berlin from the mid-1990s. Slama draws on history, social change, comics and science fiction literature with regard to humanity, modernity and the world of machines. His figurative painting style and the technical virtuosity of his paintings and drawings are among the valued works of contemporary art. The artist thus stands in the long tradition of European painting history, which he has led into the narratives of the 21st century. 

Torsten Slama was born in 1967 in Schwarzach, Austria, and moved with his family to the Bergisches Land region near Cologne. He became a master student of Professor Fritz Schwegler at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and was further inspired by the vibrant Cologne art scene at the time. In close contact with the artist Kai Althoff and the gallery owners Nicolaus Schafhausen and Daniel Buchholz, numerous joint exhibitions were organized. In 1998, he was awarded the ars viva prize of the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. with an exhibition tour at Portikus in Frankfurt under the direction of Kasper König, among other venues. Parallel to his work as an artist, Torsten Slama works as a programmer and corresponds mainly in English. A specially designed homepage summarises the key terms for understanding his work in an ABC. After living in Berlin and Brussels, Torsten Slama lived and worked in Cologne again. 

Torsten Slama's estate consists of over 140 paintings and 190 pencil and coloured pencil drawings. The artist has always worked in groups of works, often with exact titles, both on paper and on canvas. He has invented his own reference system with an unusual vocabulary of metaphors that are interwoven like a hypertext. The elaborate framing of his drawings and paintings, which appear old-masterly, is also significant. During his lifetime, his works are acquired for the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as international private collections. A major solo exhibition was organised in Houston, Texas, in 2009. The mystery of his paintings is a consolation for the untimely death of Torsten Slama and is now to be made accessible for the future.