Marius Steiger : Lust for Life

Drawing on the age-old legacy of still life painting, Marcus Steiger’s work explores questions of authenticity, consumption and our increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world, creating works that are both alluring and unsettling in their polished, synthetic rendering of organic matter.

One can view Steiger’s work as a contemporary subversion of Vanitas paintings. While this
historical genre of still life 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. The artist begins his process from 3D

models, since, as he states, “in a digital world there are no physical rules.” He then trans-
lates these images into painting and sculpture through the careful, painstaking layering

of paint and polish. The result is the rendering of delicate, hand-made forms that look im-
mune from imperfection, yet feel distinctly material in their surface and objecthood.

In some of his most recent work, Steiger challenges the categorical boundary between

painting and object. Here, paintings are no longer contained within the confines of a con-
ventional canvas but rather become a seamless part of their context – bringing their un-
canny artificiality even closer to our world.