With Martina Steckholzer painting is documentary, deconstructive and poetic. In large-format room images, she looks at exhibition architecture and stages of contemporary discourse. Steckholzer empties, abstracts and generates space. To do this, she uses the most minimal tool in painting: pigment, dense or flowing on the surface. Empty as they are, the picture spaces become open stages and foreboding documentary traces. An affirmative and projective type of institutional criticism is emerging.
Martina Steckholzer understands art, time and others in and through painting.
The gaze is more intimate in the works on paper. Here it is faces and bodies that are quickly applied to small-format paper. Dye and water react in a fleeting moment to form vulnerable surfaces. Steckholzer writes fragmentary texts for the painting and adds them to the pictures depending on the exhibition context.
—Alice Reil, 2020