untitled, 2023
tempera and acrylic ink on canvas
110 x 150 cm
On Request
Courtesy The artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne In the years 2018 and 2019 Rebekka Steiger (b. 1993 in Zurich, works in Lucerne, Switzerland, and Beijing, China) spent an extended stay as artist in residence at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing. While she continued working in her distinctive style, her extensive stay in a foreign country allowed her more freedom of mind and openness to surprises and chance encounters. Through a layer-by-layer color rendering, Rebekka Steiger transformed her perception of emotions and atmospheres into mysterious and delicate art pieces, achieving unexpected visual results. The tension between abstraction and representation, the expressive rendering of bright colors as well as the use of non-narrative figurative motifs are key aspects of her work that make the painting not only intriguing, but also unsettling. The artist explained her paintings from this period with the following: “My paintings have been developed mostly in two phases. To begin with I work quickly, often on the floor using mainly ink and water. I set a rough composition with ink first. Then, by lifting the canvas, the more fluid parts connect to each other and let the pure ink colors merge. I adjust the outcome as long as the painting is still wet until I sense the overall rhythm of the paint provides a good starting point. After the canvas dried, a more slow and considerate process starts. Undertaking a close inspection of what has happened on the canvas, I work my way across it inch by inch. Trying to discover the most beautiful, if ever so small detail and emphasizing it, either by overpainting distractive parts or filling in the blanks to bring out even the finest traces of the dispersed paint. The challenge is not to loose track of the overall composition when being this focused on details.” Now, having just successfully completed another artist-in-residence-program in Vietnam, her working method and paintings have evolved yet again. She dedicates her practice in the quest for inner harmony, challenging the status quo at the same time. Steiger is an artist who embodies painting as a state of mind, determined to go with the flow without being constrained by conceptualism and overthinking. During her artist residency in Beijing, she was inspired by Japanese ink painting and the linguistic ambiguities of Chinese. Since then, she has experimented with ink, tempera and oil paint, creating unique effects due to the different textures of the materials. Language has always played a major role in Steigers oeuvre, so the influence of Vietnamese in her latest works is not surprising, but nether less impressive. The fusion of shapes and colors results in a fascinating world. Her visual language suggests a progression into the unknown and sets no limits to one’s imagination. In spring 2024 Rebekka will exhibit her works in a solo show at TANK art center in Shanghai. Rebekka Steiger was born in Zurich in 1993. She studied art at the Lucerne School of Art and Design from 2013 to 2016. In 2016 she was awarded two prizes: the Exhibition Prize from the Kunstgesellschaft Luzern and the Advancement Award from the zeugindesign-Stiftung. Among her most prominent solo shows are Rebekka Steiger - boxing the compass at the Kunsthaus Grenchen (2020), the Werkschau Zürich 2020 at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (Zurich), and the group show Zentral! at the Kunstmuseum Luzern.