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until 02.08. | #4332ARTatBerlin | Galerie Tanja Wagner presents from 21st June 2024 the exhibition Was am Tiefsten in der Welt liegt by the artist Anna Steinert.
Galerie Tanja Wagner presents the second solo exhibition by Anna Steinert: Was am Tiefsten in der Welt liegt.
While Steinert undertook an exploratory journey into the transcendence of the imaginative power in her first solo exhibition Wanderings, she now turns her attention to what surrounds us on, above and below the earth.
The title of her exhibition, which features video, sculpture and paintings, is based on Emanuele Coccia’s The Roots of the World – an essay that helps us to understand plants as creators of the world, the vital basis of existence, mediators between sun and earth and living beings of equal value with hidden bodies in the ground.
In her new 3-channel video installation Erdemojies – Forscher*innen der Mischung, Steinert brings in reinforcements: The performers and fellow artists Monika Michalko, Nschotschi Haslinger, Cora Saller, Katharina Duve, Hanna Matthes, Helena Ratka, Sophie Labrey and Helena Wittmann (camera) appear as naturalists, healers and superheroes who, in an experimental and playful approach, accompanied by darkly wavering electro sounds and drums, summon nature and elemental forces with the common aim of setting healthy structures in motion for all living beings.
Their performative gestures remind of ceremonial rites; with their fine branches, roots and hairs, the masks that Steinert has formed from organic material and are on view as relics in the exhibition, are reminiscent of sensual antennas. As terrestrial beings of fable and otherworldly creatures of art, the artists appear both staged as a tableau vivant and as active individual performers – yet always as part of a collective entity in which all is interconnected, inextricably interwoven, influencing each other and completely dissolving hierarchies between nature, humans, arts and culture.
In this present age, in which nature has become a plantation that can be formalized and scaled, and the plant world has been pushed to the margins of our perception as an insignificant splash of colour, Steinert brings nature forcefully back into focus. With carefree and playful curiosity, she explores in her vibrant paintings the energy fields, emotional landscapes and nuances that surround us all. Her powerfully vivid motifs tell of anger and rebelliousness, playfulness and urgency, humour, darkness, dreams and nightmares. The physically gestural squiggles and strokes in her paintings, like her masks, are reminiscent of fine antennas – highly sensitively aligned, they receive and transmit simultaneously and connect us and everything with each other.
Anna Steinert was born in 1983 in Krefeld and lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg with Werner Büttner and Hanne Loreck. Steinert has participated in institutional exhibitions such as n.b.k. (2022), Kunstmuseum Bochum (2019), Kunsthalle Schlieren in Zurich (2018), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (2016) and at Hamburger Kunsthalle (2015) among others. Her works Little Wanderings II and Die seltsamen Riten der Frau Doktor Arabeske will be on view at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg from end of June this year.
Vernissage: Friday, 21st June 2024 from 6 until 9 pm
Opening dates: Friday, 21st June until Friday, 2nd August 2024
To Gallery
Image caption title: Anna Steinert’s studio, 2024. © Luca Caciagli
Exhibition Anna Steinert – Galerie Tanja Wagner | Zeitgenössische Kunst | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
