Julia Steiner
growing

MM: In your work, I often sense a tension between temporalities. Some pieces, like the early fragments, carry a raw urgency, while others, like cosmos (blossom) or the ceramics, feel slow, grounded, as if they have settled into themselves. These contrasting rhythms seem to echo nature’s own logic, always shifting between eruption and rest, growth and dormancy. And then there is your use of black and white, which feels more conceptual than simply aesthetic. Almost like a gesture of reverence, a deliberate refusal to compete with the complexity of nature’s colors. Is this balance between different paces and movements something you consciously plan? What is it that black and white offers you, especially in relation to the landscape, that other colors don’t? JS: That balance between energies and temporalities is definitely there, but it’s not something I plan. It emerges through the process. In nature, but especially in the mountains, I experience a tension between different perceptions of time. A sense of vastness, yet also an intense immediacy, the awareness of your own fragility. That contrast is something that deeply interests me: the fact that everything is in flux, and you are just there, present in the now, knowing that the next moment might already bring a shift, a transformation. This duality shapes how I work. Drawings often respond to internal motion, they come quickly, instinctively. Sculptural pieces unfold more slowly, they take time to become. Working in black and white allows me to remain in a space of sensing. It frees me from having to choose or explain. Color always carries associations, but I’m not aiming to make an image of nature. It’s more abstract than that. For me, black and white leaves more room for interpretation. That said, color has returned in recent works, but only when the connection I’m following asks for it. In untitled (rose), for example, red isn’t tied to the flower, but points toward the body. It’s rooted in the idea of an organ, something internal, visceral, and connected to growth.

MM: In the mountains, silence feels almost loud. Looking at Wogen (weite Fragen), I feel a dense quiet, a charged stillness. It made me think of the Romantic “sublime”, an intense, almost overwhelming aesthetic experience tied to natural phenomena, where fear and pleasure coexist. Seen through that lens, your fragments at first appear to stand in contrast. They’re small, restrained. But then I remembered how the German Romantics, like Schlegel and Novalis, celebrated the fragment as both an art form and a philosophical idea. Schlegel in particular saw the fragment not as a single totality but as a chaotic universality of many opposing viewpoints. In that sense, your fragments are deeply connected to the sublime, just not in scale, but in scope. Not miniatures, but magnitudes.

JS: That is exactly what I want to convey. When I draw a fragment, it’s never just about that single part, it’s about all the other fragments, points of view, or different moments that might exist around it. Each one is a point of entry into something larger. The same idea is behind the Fenster works: a window frames only a portion, but that portion becomes powerful because it invites the imagination beyond its edges. The cosmos (blossom) pieces follow a similar logic as well. In those, I embedded flowers from my studio into the glass casting process. They burn immediately, leaving behind ash and air bubbles. I see the flowers as a kind of “Ursprung”, an origin, because in their combustion, they become something else. It’s like looking into a new cosmos, a vast sky contained within something so small. A quiet universe growing or condensing within a brief moment.

Julia Steiner was born in Büren zum Hof (BE) in 1982. She lives and works in Basel. She studied at the Bern University of the Arts, with a semester at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2018-19 she held a temporary professorship at the Braunschweig University of Art. The artist has realized numerous solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad. Among others at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, the Marta Herford Museum, the He Xiangning Art Museum Shenzhen, the Galerie Urs Meile and the Centre Pasquart Biel. She has realized site-specific works and art-and-architecture projects, for example in the Abbey Church in Bellelay in the Swiss Jura and the Basel Berufsfachschule. Julia Steiner has received numerous prizes, including the Swiss Art Award, the Manor Art Prize and the Strabag Artaward, and has taken part in various artist-in-residence programs in Switzerland, Beijing, London and Mallorca. Her works are represented in institutional collections in Switzerland (e.g. Kunstmuseen Bern, Thun, Biel) as well as in international private collections.