Julia Steiner's work deals with mental landscapes. She is interested in condensations, in blank spaces and in states of transition. The act of drawing provides the artist with the magical identity between thinking and taking action. The direct and raw force of her work involves the viewer from the very first moment. The paintings are developped without any outlines or other preparatory steps. Quite irreversibly, Julia Steiner applies the thick gouache onto the sheet with a paint brush.
Read MoreShe dispels the narrative gesture of the drawing, however, by denying herself to the brush stroke. She develops her paintings by fragments which she condenses to spaces, thus highlighting the contemplative quality of her work. The chosen formats imply a suggestion to almost physically enter the pictorial space. In her technique the artist succeeds in uniting divergences which have their roots in her very subjects and which most subtly have become a constitutive element of her pictures.
Julia Steiner stayed as artist-in-residence at the gallery's residency in Beijing from October 2009 to January 2010. She won the Swiss Art Award and the Kiefer Hablitzel grant in 2009. In 2010, she received the Manor Art Award, canton Berne. She lives and works in Berne/Switzerland.
Text courtesy Galerie Urs Meile.
