Sereina Steinemann (1984) works with the media of painting, drawing, video and object. A new aspect is her engagement with non-representational painting, for which two aspects play a central role: colours and words. In Steinemann’s paintings the colours stand only for themselves and do not fulfil any illustrative function. The artist searches for and collects colours which she finds in printed matter as well as in nature and urban space. She continuously creates an archive with her own photos, book illustrations, packaging, paper cuttings and curiosities. For her paintings she falls back on this fund. She intuitively juxtaposes the colours like associative thoughts. To do this, she mixes tones corresponding to the collected originals, which she applies to canvas carefully, freehand and in strips. The colours change in the process of painting by constantly layering them one on top of the other and by adjusting the colours in relation to the other bands of colour. In this way each painting receives a kind of hand-written rhythmic colour sequence.
Like colours, Steinemann also collects nouns. They serve as possible titles for her paintings. She records these nouns in continuous lists. As suddenly and determinedly as the colours come together, Steinemann also chooses a term from her list as a title for a painting. Only then are the works complete for the artist. The clash of colours and words is like a flash of inspiration. The artist rethinks these colour/title compositions continuously and in connection with newly created works. The suddenness in the emergence is transferred into a kind of grammar of the pictures, which is also reflected in the open text of the titles.
The artist’s book “PAPPE GINSTER STALL” is published on the occasion of Sereina Steinemann's solo exhibition at the Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen on the occasion of the Manor Art Prize award. For this publication, Steinemann combines an extensive selection of colour originals from her collection with the current list of words and spreads out before us the potential of future paintings and their possible titles.