Rosi Steinbach:
Showcase 2000—2025
3 May—7 June 2025
at Spinnerei archiv massiv

Rosi Steinbach is showing a selection of her ceramic objects from the last 25 years as part of the Spinnerei Galleries Spring Tour. One part of the exhibition features around 20 portrait busts that she has made in recent years of acquaintances and people from the art world. They include artists, gallery owners and museum directors, the protagonists of the Leipzig art scene, so to speak. The ceramics are precisely modelled without succumbing to naturalism. They are bound by tradition and inspired by works from the Renaissance.

It is no coincidence that she was commissioned by the Grassi Museum to skilfully complete a “Madonna with the Infant Jesus” from the workshop of the famous 16th century Florentine Renaissance artist Giovanni della Robbia. However, her busts are quite contemporary in their execution, exaggerated by the multi-coloured glossy glazes. With her portrait busts, she captures the present and documents contemporary history in her own way.

She treats her objects borrowed from nature, plants and animals, tree trunks and mushrooms, lichens and crystals in the same way as her busts. Solidified forms and high-gloss surfaces create an effect of sublime distance. The thoroughly decorative structures often have a human-influenced nature as their theme.

The bizarrely fissured rootstocks and colourful, iridescent tree fungi are about the dying of the forest and when the tree fungi grow out of the walls in Rosi Steinbach's “Living Room”, they perhaps herald the slow farewell to a familiar feeling of security and comfort.

Christoph Tannert: “Her crouching gorilla with drawn knife does not thematise the defenceless creature that has to endure human insanity, but a defenseless species that goes on the counterattack.”

Schnuppe von Gwinner: “Tradition and modernity are both, elementally and indispensably, part of her artistic expression, which comes across as both realistically descriptive and imaginatively abstract, simultaneously pragmatically documenting and yet creatively fabulating. Her works show a contemporary perspective on the world, whose modernity is surprisingly reinforced by the consistent use of the faience technique, which clearly has traditional connotations.” 

Spinnerei archiv massiv

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