Martina Steckholzer

Martina Steckholzer's painting is documentary, deconstructive and poetic. In large-format spatial pictures, she looks at the architectural structures of exhibitions and at stages for contemporary discourse. Steckholzer empties, abstracts and generates space. She uses the most minimal tool of painting for this purpose: pigment, dense or flowing in its application. Empty as they are, the pictorial spaces become open stages and intuitive documentary traces. An affirmative and projective sort of institutional critique comes to expression. In a rapid application of paint, faces and bodies find their place upon small-format paper. Pigment, paper and water react in the fleeting moment to form vulnerable surfaces. It is in and through painting that Martina Steckholzer works toward an understanding of art, of time, of other persons. She composes fragmentary texts to accompany what she has painted and, depending on the exhibition context, adds them to the pictorial works. For the first time in twenty years, Steckholzer is presenting a book. She carefully combines the format of the book and the medium of painting and, within these pages, gives a new pictorial space to the large-format paintings. There are three chapters: A Stage/A Play/The Characters. A Stage presents fragile architectural structures and spaces, initially with each filling an entire page. As the second chapter, A Play is the ongoing series of works Die Lauer. This is highly colourful painting: partly abstract, partly figurative. The Characters are people rendered on paper in nine short series. At the end of the book, an index arranges 445 pictorial works into a prismatic overview.