Christoph Steinmeyer

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce exhibitions of new work by Christoph Steinmeyer in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, November 20, from six to eight pm.

Christoph Steinmeyer’s new canvases essay the traditional painting subjects of still lifes and interiors. Familiar yet strange, the objects Steinmeyer depicts seem on the verge of dissolution; forms appear to waver, and figure melts with ground like mirages caused by desert heat. Hallucinogenic images, these paintings reimagine art-historical genres as if through a drug-induced dream or the textured glass of a shower door.Like his previous series of uncannily symmetrical portraits of women, Steinmeyer’s new images are assembled from a large repertoire of component parts, many digitally morphed and distorted. Large still lifes of flowers and fruit have as their source Old Master paintings from centuries past. The interiors come from classics of twentieth-century cinema: Marnie is a composite drawn from a number of scenes in Hitchcock’s eponymous film, the creepy room rendered in Rose from Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Steinmeyer’s technique seems to conflate the tension and suspense of the films into a single image, compressing the narrative, characters, and plot into a still. The empty interior somehow retains the psychological charge of the movie. The flowers and fruit of the artist’s still lifes translate the florid fervor and aspects of the memento mori of the originals (decay and rot, flies and worms in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings) into insinuations of a fevered death of the image, a kind of demise of the picture’s capacity to represent.

Christoph Steinmeyer lives and works in Düsseldorf. This will be his first solo exhibition in New York. His paintings were featured in a project room at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in 2003 and have been included in group shows at Matthew Marks, Andrea Rosen, and C&M Arts. One-man show of his work have been held at Galerie Michael Janssen in Cologne and The Happy Lion in Los Angeles.

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Christoph Steinmeyer