German artist ‘troops the color’ in exhibition

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Dirimart is currently displaying Christoph Steinmeyer’s “Trooping the Color,” a solo exhibition featuring seven of his large-scale oil paintings. Steinmeyer astounds viewers with figures bearing the traces of the Romantic tradition, extending from the 19th century to the present. Steinmeyer, breaking down all prejudices, invites the viewers into the depths of the fantastic dream world he portrays.

Born in Düsseldorf, Christoph Steinmeyer, moved into painting after studying philosophy and art history. Since the mid-1990s he has worked with a kind of symbolism that can be described as magical, using widely recognized visuals and transforming them by extracting their original contents. In his more recent work, he has combined this signature magical symbolism with cinematographic elements. He makes use of specific picture-in-picture combinations to break the space-time continuum of interior spaces. Rather than being artificial figures, Steinmeyer’s “non-portraits” are filtered personifications that are extracted of their essences. They meet the audience through a conversion process from analog to digital, a process that can perhaps not yet be named or understood. His depictions can be defined as expanded representations, as well as demarcating displays in a sociological sense. At first, this appears to be a result of the initially broken and filtered imagery. However, as the result of the decaying process of the alienated and destroyed material, a pop-psychedelic and baroque organism that embeds biological forms and strong colors within emerges. Even though, the molecular essence of this organism is formed by familiar materials, it represents an ethereal existence.

The reference points of the exhibited works are portraits of male figures in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and Steinmeyer’s work on these models is multi-layered and detailed. The exhibition continues until Mar. 11 at Dirimart in Nişantaşı, Istanbul.