Marius Steiger – Hermitage

Curated by Kiki Seiler-Michalitsi

In his exhibition, Marius Steiger (b. 1999, Bern, lives in Bern and London) explores the genre of painting: he examines its history and tradition, as well as the discrepancy between nature and artificiality, figuration and abstraction, illusion and simulation of objects or situations. He does not draw directly on nature or existing objects, but rather on digitally generated reproductions of 3D visualizations. The resulting works – individual motifs and objects (fruit, furniture, cars, spheres, Greek busts or iconic architecture and architectural elements) or paintings and shaped canvases created in the tradition of trompe l'oeil painting – mutate in the exhibition, both individually and as a whole, into a holistic still life of digital aesthetics. However, their flawless surface and fragmentation reveal their artificiality and their origin in the virtual world – the artist's exploration of painting as a metaphor for perception and memory.

Marius Steiger works with installations and immersive art. His oil paintings in the exhibition, which are presented in accordance with the architectural features of the three floors, combine real stories and fiction. Covering all the windows in the Kunst Raum Riehen with red transparent film also creates a kind of distance from the outside world, with the view outside suggesting painting and thus becoming part of the exhibition situation inside. The exhibition itself, an artificially constructed world in which history, myth and the present overlap, thus mutates into a retreat from painted illusions, into a ‘hermitage’. It is Marius Steiger's first solo exhibition in an institution.

The exhibition is supported by:
Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung
Burgergemeinde Bern
C. und A. Kupper-Stiftung
Marti-Clerici Stiftung