Martina Steckholzer uses as a source for her paintings, video footage which she films in exhibition halls, museums, art fairs and artist’s studios – all places where art is seen or made. The filming is sometimes random where she moves the camera around the space without looking through the lens and sometimes more specific when she points the camera at something she finds interesting. In both cases, her purpose is to catch images hidden from our usual gaze – images that could only be seen through the lens of the camera and caught on the still of the video footage. Martina Steckholzer’s paintings offer a poetic ambience suggesting an infinite nothingness of space. Working from video footage filmed in art galleries, air fairs, studios, and museums, she isolates frames that capture the in-between spaces, unusual angles, and overlooked vantages of familiar generic places. Translated into paintings, these images become dislocated into virtual fields: flat canvases projecting abstracted illusions of line, shape, and tone replay the experience of gallery within the gallery, mirroring the hallowed white cube as sublime aesthetic.
After identifying a single frame from the video, she isolates the image and uses it as the basis of the painting. Although she stays with the main structure and image in the video frame, the paintings are never graphic and it is important to her that they maintain a painterly quality. The viewer is left with a feeling of uncertainty and is never quite sure where or how the paintings are made – why are some abstract, some more figurative? In many there are figurative clues alluding to architectural space, such as in, Chromogenic 2005, but the perspective and fragmented space is difficult to identify. In others there are clearer figurative elements such as, Maybe we Should 2005, a painting made from the image of a landscape photograph. These are punctuated by purely abstract images such as Artist’s Body 2005 (from an image of a roll of film). The titles of the works are also from the video footage and taken from text that appears in the film of the space – maybe signs, labels, titles – not always relating to the image in the painting but always appearing in the film from which the image was taken. Martina Steckholzer’s Neon uses only grey hues to further minimalise her architectural subjects; as the recognisable melts away through delicate layers of paint, only the empty inference of space remains. In Neon, Steckholzer uses the malleable quality of her medium to reflect phantasmal tricks of light, her graphic image dissolves into subtle hand-made gestures. Cut through with black forms, Neon gives the sensation of both solidity and weightlessness, creating an ephemeral expressionism from the cold rationality of photographic media.
