SHANGHAI.- Galerie Urs Meile is now showing the emerging Swiss artist Rebekka Steiger’s (b. 1993) first major institutional solo exhibition in China. Titled Octopus Mountain, the exhibition launched at Tank Shanghai on March 1, 2024 and will last for three months.

This exhibition assembles works by Rebekka Steiger from the past six years. What becomes visible is the webwork of Steiger's growing oeuvre. Strewn with recurring figurative motives and abstract movements, it is so diverse in style and visual language, that only upon closer inspection the connections between the individual paintings become apparent. Personal expression, abstract formations, figurative and sometimes seemingly symbolically charged content take shape in step with the artist's technical experimentation in her painting.

By giving titles to her paintings Rebekka Steiger re-examines and retrospectively puts in contextual order what she could not always place straight away. Only recently the artist began to further spin stories around certain titles, surpassing mere background information. In these 'title stories' Steiger puts something in words that are not necessarily visible in a painting, yet is still connected to that specific work: Either because it preceded it, accompanied it or else is added later in the process of an associative title search: a real personal experience, a contemporary historical event, a fortunate discovery while looking for sources.

Steiger's painting doesn't consist of a conceptual series. Equally, the texts can not only be matched with their associated paintings, but can be connected to others as well. The 'title stories' become works in their own right, independent parts of the webwork. In a reverse order to their time of creation, the four short texts included serve as points of departure, 'chapter headings', in this exhibition. It is from them that the connecting lines are drawn to paintings from different phases of the artist's work.

Artist

Rebekka Steiger (*1993, Zurich) lives in Zurich. She is an artist who embodies painting as a state of mind. The fusion of shapes and colors results in a fascinating visual language that suggests a progression into the unknown and sets no limits to the viewer’s imagination. Steiger graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Hochschule Luzern (HSLU) in 2016. Since then, her works have been presented as solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne and Beijing, Kunst (Zeug) Haus in Rapperswil-Jona, and as part of a group exhibitions at Meicheng Space in Shenzhen, Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Galerie Bromer in Zurich, and Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne, Ardez, and Beijing, among others. She spent 2018-2019 in residencies in Beijing, China and from 2022-2023 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Galerie Urs Meile
Rebekka Steiger: Octopus Mountain
March 1st - June 2nd, 2024