Martina Steckholzer
Martina Steckholzer, H.S.B.A.A.C. 2522, Hemisphere, 2022. View of Sala Trenker, Ortisei. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
The work of Martina Steckholzer is concrete, abstract and poetic at once. Working with painting, she investigates the regimes of representation that constitute the Western canon of art history. In large-format spatial paintings, she looks at the architectural structures of exhibitions and at stages for contemporary discourse. Reduced as they are, the pictorial spaces become open stages and intuitive documentary traces. In Steckholzer’s mostly figurative watercolours, pigment, paper and water react in the fleeting moment to form vulnerable surfaces. The artist at times writes fragmentary texts to accompany what she has painted and, depending on the exhibition context, adds them to the paintings. For the Biennale, Steckholzer presents Hemisphere and Planisphere (2022), works in which she pays tribute to prints of celestial charts from the early 1700s, which are populated with all sorts of earthly and mythical creatures that she renders and interprets in her usual painterly method, detaching the work from the source while maintaining the freely floating creatures, strangely connected to one another.
Martina Steckholzer, H.S.B.A.A.C. 2522, Hemisphere, 2022. View of Sala Trenker, Ortisei. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Martina Steckholzer
Martina Steckholzer, H.S.B.A.A.C. 2522, Hemisphere, 2022. View of Sala Trenker, Ortisei. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
The work of Martina Steckholzer is concrete, abstract and poetic at once. Working with painting, she investigates the regimes of representation that constitute the Western canon of art history. In large-format spatial paintings, she looks at the architectural structures of exhibitions and at stages for contemporary discourse. Reduced as they are, the pictorial spaces become open stages and intuitive documentary traces. In Steckholzer’s mostly figurative watercolours, pigment, paper and water react in the fleeting moment to form vulnerable surfaces. The artist at times writes fragmentary texts to accompany what she has painted and, depending on the exhibition context, adds them to the paintings. For the Biennale, Steckholzer presents Hemisphere and Planisphere (2022), works in which she pays tribute to prints of celestial charts from the early 1700s, which are populated with all sorts of earthly and mythical creatures that she renders and interprets in her usual painterly method, detaching the work from the source while maintaining the freely floating creatures, strangely connected to one another.
Martina Steckholzer, H.S.B.A.A.C. 2522, Hemisphere, 2022. View of Sala Trenker, Ortisei. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo