Andrzej Steinbach - Hier

A visual language all its own

The exhibition title Hier can be read as a helping hand: his works are about the gesture of showing. That sobriety helps to isolate patterns, whether it concerns details or structures in society, and creates space to reflect on the mechanisms behind looking itself. Steinbach presents the gaze as an aesthetic problem. Instead of solving it, his art gives the problem a form that can be admired and pondered elsewhere.

Figures

Like a director, Andrzej Steinbach builds up his images: ‘Hier there must be a scratch in the surface’ and ‘hier your hand must lie’. His models follow his instructions meticulously and make small variations in their gestures, posture or outfit. Their invariably neutral facial expression reveals nothing about their personality. Steinbach simply calls them ‘figures’. He uses these figures, backgrounds and compositions to create typologically structured series that aesthetically investigate how we assign meaning, roles and types to what we see, even when much information is withheld.

Society begins with 3

The series Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei (2017) investigates the division of roles between people. Three figures perform a choreography of changing postures, compositions and clothing, causing their mutual dynamics to be constantly subject to change. The title refers to the proposition that a power play between 3 elements underlies most structures, and ultimately society itself. In almost every photo of Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei there are only 3 eyes: each time one of the faces is cut off. The images flow into each other to form a group portrait full of inconsistencies.

In the pose of Mayakovsky

These inconsistencies are intentional; Steinbach often exposes photographic conventions by subtly breaking them. In a key work, he had a construction worker adopt the same pose as the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in a famous photo by Alexander Rodchenko from 1924: the figure sits spread-eagled, leaning slightly forward, and looks straight into the lens with an intense gaze. A hard hat replaces Mayakovsky's fedora, while a vape takes the place of his cigarette. Detached from the original context, the posture is not an expression of individuality, but a culturally inherited gesture that can be adopted by another body.