Marius Steiger: Vanity
When Everyday Objects Become Cultural Signs
Joowon Park (Curator, Director of Supermade)
Marius Steiger (born 1999, based in London and Switzerland) does not see painting as simply a way to copy what lies before his eyes. His works move fluidly between images,objects, and the social systems that surround them, generating new layers of meaning.
His practice emerges at the intersection of digital and analogue, where painting is continually questioned and reimagined.
Steiger's process always begins with an idea rather than directly copying real objects. Instead, he uses computer software to build 3D models and renderings based on mental images. At this stage, he can fully control design, lighting, perspective, and colour. With cars, for example, he may subtly adjust the curves of the body, shift the angle, or redirect the light. With apples, he sometimes invents new colours or varieties that do not exist in nature. At other times, he keeps the form unchanged but combines objects in unusual ways, creating unexpected juxtapositions.
Once the digital image is complete, Steiger transforms it into a painting. The 3D model is flattened into a two-dimensional image, its outline traced so the stretcher can be cut to the exact shape. Linen is stretched across it, several layers of gesso are applied, and the painting is built up slowly with precise, flat brushstrokes. The virtual image on the screen gradually returns to material form. Unlike the instant results of the digital world, this process requires long hours of manual labour. The contrast between digital speed and the slowness of hand-painting gives his works a distinctive tension.
His paintings appear on shaped canvases cut to the outline of the object. This shifts the relationship between painting and space, as the edge between image and support disappears and the wall and air around the canvas become part of the work. In exhibitions, the paintings are arranged not as isolated pieces but as elements in dialogue, connected through the movements and gazes of viewers. Steiger describes this as an "image-based or painting-based installation," where painting functions as both a visual scene and a spatial experience.
In this context, the choice of objects plays a central role. Steiger is inspired by everyday things such as cars, chairs, apples, mirrors, and shelves. These are so familiar that we often overlook them. He brings them back into focus, painting them with< hyperreal detail or combining them in strange ways. In his work, they become more than tools; they raise questions about society, culture, and the way we think. Perfect surfaces, precise arrangements, and display formats recall modernism's pursuit of order while also evoking capitalism, marketing, and mass production today.
The perspective of Michel Foucault, who argued that objects do not simply exist but are defined and interpreted within social institutions and gazes, provides an important starting point for understanding Steiger's work. Foucault's notions of power, discipline, and the classification of knowledge reveal that objects are never neutral but acquire meaning within specific systems of order. In this sense, the everyday objects that appear in Steiger's paintings are not merely subjects of representation. They function as cultural signs that reveal the values, desires, and norms shaped by social structures. In the Case series, polished wood grain is carefully painted, but the book spines are grey and unreadable. Within this monotony, a piece of fruit, a cigarette, or a small keepsake interrupts the scene, hinting at traces of human presence. In the Car series,the subject is not a specific model but the endlessly reproduced idea of the car circulating in advertising, design, and collective imagination. The glossy surfaces may resemble media images, but their shine is the result of hundreds of hours of brushwork.
This approach continues in the Apple Circle series. Each apple is placed on a< uniquely shaped canvas. Some are painted with extreme realism, while others appear in colours that do not exist in reality. Arranged in a circle, the apples suggest that an apple is no longer just a fruit. It is at once an emoji, a logo, a painting, and a stock image. In other words, a single image reveals the layered complexity of today's visual culture, where symbols, signs, commodities, and artworks overlap, are consumed, and circulate endlessly. At the same time, the apples recall the history of still life, unsettling our perception much like Cézanne once disrupted the act of looking. Steiger's apples demonstrate how perception is formed through ceaseless reproduction and mediation, yet he insists on using linen and maintaining a consistent stretcher depth. This persistence underscores that even the most experimental gestures remain in dialogue with, rather than in rupture from, the tradition of painting.
In this way, Steiger keeps the language of painting alive while making it unfamiliar. He introduces small breaks into the illusion. From afar, his works look real, but up close the flatness of the surface and the cut edges of the canvas become clear. The illusion collapses, and the viewer realises it is paint on fabric. Steiger welcomes this delicate overlap of illusion and reality. Rather than resolving the dissonance, he uses it to make images feel like objects and objects feel like images. His paintings, which appear perfectly seamless, ultimately reveal the marks of their making and prompt us to reflect on how we see. The machine-like perfection, achieved only through painstaking manual labour, mirrors the way we experience images today.
Steiger's works do not offer final answers. Instead, they make the familiar strange, reminding us that our ways of seeing are shaped by visual conventions. His shaped canvases link objects to walls, bodies, and movement, transforming the spaces between them into part of the work. As viewers pass through, they confront not only the images but also the very process of their making and circulation. In an age< when digital images appear and vanish in an instant, Steiger insists on the slowness of paint, embedding within each work the tension between machine-like perfection and the labour of the hand. Through this fragile balance, slow, precise, and slightly strange, he rewrites painting for the present, proving that it can still show us how we see, and compel us to look again.
