Rosi Steinbach Showcase 2000—2025
Spinnerei archiv massiv
3 May—7 June 2025
Spinnereistrasse 7, 04170 Leipzig, DE
Rosi Steinbach is showing a selection of her ceramic objects from the last 25 years. 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 and Child Jesus« from the workshop of the famous 16th century Florentine Renaissance artist Giovanni della Robbia. However, her busts are completely contemporary in their execution, enhanced 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.
—Josef Filipp
Rosi Steinbach, born in 1957 in Karl-Marx-Stadt / Chemnitz, lives and works in Leipzig.
1981 Diploma in plant engineering | since 1990 works in ceramics
Since 1996 ceramics studio and participation in exhibitions
2022 Artist in Residence at the Academy of Ceramics Gmunden, Gmundner Keramik, AT
2021 Grassi Prize of the Goerdeler Foundation, Grassi Museum of Applied Arts, Leipzig
2011 Prize of the 18th annual exhibition in Leipzig