Steven Black
Augustenstraße 63
January 17 – February 15, 2025

Opening – Steven Black will be present
Friday, January 17, 2025, 6 pm – 9 pm

I work from immediate observation. Additionally, I also make strictly abstract paintings. That means I work either exclusively from the motif or entirely without a motif. For the paintings with human figures, it is usually friends who pose for the duration of the work. The arrangement of the painting comes about with the sitting. Posture and position are not predetermined. It usually begins with the head as starting point. Once a head has emerged on the canvas, a head that more or less stands up, i.e. when the head has attained a binding unit of measurement, when its internal spacings are consistent, when it has grip, then it is possible to incrementally build onto it. The head as core that must come into being before more can be built up around it is the precondition for genesis, what Paul Klee called the germ or the egg, the first thing that develops out of chaos or nothingness and that can then continue to unfold, a genetic matrix. The rest of the body, furniture, objects, the surrounding space, further figures, can then accrue. While this happens, the spatial coordinates remain fixed. Often the same person is repeated once or several times in a painting with minimal alterations to posture. This repetition of figures with small variations may go back to an earlier course of studies involving film and animation, the experience of the film strip splitting movement into smaller transitions. It might also go back to the repetitions and variations of nearly identical figures in Renaissance painting such as that of Piero della Francesca. One effort here is to make the genetic principle more explicit in the paintings: the way that larger complexes produce themselves by multiplying smaller elements, as in processes of natural growth. More important perhaps is to make the space and bodies graspable in the literal sense, to generate grip, to bring things out as tactile bodies rather than as pictorial appearances – to produce pictures of things not of other pictures.

– Steven Black (translated from the German) –