Marius Steiger – Hermitage

In the exhibition curated by Kiki Seiler-Michalitsi, Marius Steiger (*1999, Bern, lives in Bern and London) explores the genre of painting: he deals with its history and tradition, as well as with the discrepancy between nature and artificiality, with figuration and abstraction, with illusion and simulation of objects or situations. He does not orientate himself directly on nature or existing objects, but on digitally generated reproductions of 3D visualizations. The pictorial works created on this basis - individual motifs and objects (fruit, furniture, cars, spheres, Greek busts or iconic architecture and architectural elements) or paintings and shaped canvases 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. In their immaculate surface and fragmentation, however, their artificiality and their origin in the virtual world is revealed - the artist's examination of painting as a metaphor for perception and memory.

Marius Steiger's work is installative and immersive. His oil paintings in the exhibition, whose presentation follows the architectural features of the three floors, combine real narratives and fictions. By covering all the windows in the Kunst Raum Riehen with red transparent film, a kind of distance to the outside world is created; the view outside suggests painting and becomes 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 of painted illusions, a "hermitage". It is Marius Steiger's first institutional solo exhibition.

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