Rebekka Steiger
和蝎子厮混 - mingling with scorpions
October 23, 2021 – January 23, 2022
Building D7, National Base for International Cultural Trade, Beijing
PRESS RELEASE – ENGLISH
Rebekka Steiger’s solo show 和蝎子厮混 – mingling with scorpions will present her most recent works since her groundbreaking debut show at Galerie Urs Meile’s Beijing gallery in 2018.
Steiger’s works oscillate between figuration and abstraction. Many of the work to be shown display recurring motives, such as landscapes and riding figures. In her recent work the artist explores new techniques. In addition to the analogue process of painting itself, where the meeting of ink, tempera, and oil paints creates new effects based on the materials’ various characteristics, the artist works digitally as well, using the smartphone’s marking function to draft additional layers for the paintings. More specific, the possibility of ‘drawing in the negative’, in the sense of being able to perfectly erase digital paint, finds the artist’s interest as a tool to perceive and abstract what is already on canvas in a different way.
Rebekka Steiger participated in artist-in-residency program at Galerie Urs Meile Beijing in 2018. Her study of both Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as the impressions she gathered while in China, have had a lasting influence on Steiger’s artistic development.
The poetic ambiguity of the Chinese language and the ambiguity of the translation continue to be an important source of inspiration for Steiger’s works. Depending upon how it is pronounced, one syllable in Chinese can have different meanings. “The Chinese language is almost like an exegesis of my work,” the artist once noted.
Rebekka Steiger (*1993 in Zurich, currently working in Lucerne, Switzerland) is one of the most promising young painters in the Swiss contemporary art circle. 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 Sykomore, Kabinettausstellung, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2017-2018, Rebekka Steiger - boxing the compass at the Kunsthaus Grenchen (2020), Werkschau Zürich 2020, Canton of Zurich, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland, and the group show Zentral! at the Kunstmuseum Luzern.
