Stefan Steiner (*1963, Steinhausen, Switzerland; lives and works in Cologne) is one of the notable representatives of contemporary gestural painting. Alongside acrylic painting, watercolour, and pictorial objects, he has produced "painted" books (artists' books) since 1991. Although Steiner's work initially appears charged with expressive energy, it is grounded in a rigorous conceptual framework reduced to a few fundamental conditions. The implementation of this system nevertheless generates a remarkable sensual and perceptual diversity.
The exhibition presented a selection of large-format watercolours and paintings alongside the complete body of artists' books created by Steiner—more than thirty bound, stitched, or bundled paper works. Most are unique pieces, while a small number were produced in limited editions. The book as an artistic object thus formed the focal point of the exhibition, recalling—while differing fundamentally from—the exhibition Jim Dine – 52 Books, presented at Museum Liner in 2008.
For Steiner's first solo museum exhibition in Switzerland since 2002, we deliberately adopted a curatorial approach that combined a retrospective perspective with a presentation of recent work. The book objects, book-images, and colour-infused texts reveal not only the continuity of Steiner's artistic development but also illuminate the questions that continue to accompany all forms of painterly image-making and the production of meaning today. His books embody those artistic modes of thinking and working that may culminate in painterly processes—but do not necessarily have to—since painting today is no longer tied to a specific support or even to a particular material. At the same time, the books offer insight into the highly reflective imaginative world of an artist who addresses the challenges of contemporary painting and current conceptions of the medium with both intellectual rigour and humour, resolving—or deliberately dissolving—them through a distinctive artistic language.
Steiner's oeuvre of artists' books may be divided into three principal groups. The first comprises the series collectively entitled Mosquitos, all of which refer to William Faulkner's novel of the same title. The second consists of stamped books. The third encompasses a highly diverse range of book works, including pieces that investigate the book as a physical object (Book with Rounded Corners), works employing residual paint from the artist's studio, and books that gradually generate their own visual form through the traces of repeated handling and page turning. Also belonging to this group are works that play with the expectations of reader and viewer, unexpectedly reconfiguring the temporal and spatial dimensions of the book, as well as interventions into the artist's own published series of drawings. Among these is his then most recent book, Counting from One to Ninety-Six (Systematics by Jens Peter Koerver).
The books were installed in the large sculpture gallery of Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte within an exhibition architecture developed in close collaboration with the artist. Rather than presenting the works as archival documents enclosed in display cases, the installation allowed them to emerge as multifaceted pictorial entities. Although visitors were not permitted to handle them, the presentation nevertheless conveyed the tactile dimension of painting—suggesting that painting itself can be experienced as something that touches.
In dialogue with the artists' books, the works on the walls unfolded their full force as "moments of colour." While they are the result of a sustained and disciplined engagement with the painted object, they can above all be understood as autonomous articulations of a singular poetics of colour.
