ARTISSIMA 2023
Marius Steiger (solo booth) 

Blue Velvet is pleased to present a solo booth by London based Swiss artist Marius Steiger.

The presentation in the booth combines two ongoing bodies of works: Drawing on the age-old legacy of still life painting, one can view Steiger’s paintings as a contemporary subversion of vanitas. While this historical genre strived to remind the viewer of the transience of living through the depiction of decaying matter, Steiger’s still lifes provide a sense of eternal endurance through the synthetic nature of virtual worlds. Although Steiger’s subject grapples with the tension between physical and digital realms, his practice constantly alternates between them.
In quite a similar way Steiger’s series of mushroom shaped paintings, deal with the paralelity trough the worlds. Both poisonous and enchanting, mushrooms exist at the point where children’s stories meet adult playthings and build the bridge between the real and the spiritual. A hybridisation between the natural and the artificial, the familiar and the strange. Much like the motif they depict, these paintings migrate and sprout wherever they encounter nutrients. In effect this is a giant still life made out of a collection of still life paintings. The individuals are somehow as strong as the entire whole. The world of Marius Steiger is one where painting will never die, it can do the job of all other cultural genres and has an unquenchable thirst for more.