Between Nature and the Human: Rebekka Steiger’s Visions

Nature here isn’t a backdrop but an agent: it floods the picture plane, upends the hierarchy between seer and seen, and absorbs the human instead of opposing it. After long stretches in Asia, Rebekka Steiger sharpens her vocabulary: swift gestures, liquid glazes, materials wavering between tempera, inks, and acrylic. The narrative isn’t illustrated; it’s insinuated, like an omen.
Her imagery ignites when the fox surfaces - not a tame creature, but a liminal figure that, in Eastern traditions, takes on shifting, seductive powers. Echoes of imperial courts and Europe’s witch hunts run under the skin; the history of marginalized bodies slips into the pigments and generates a productive friction. Elsewhere, a faceless rider pushes toward a tangle of blossoms: hero and bouquet seem fixed roles, then distance flips, flowers tighten like a predator, the steed multiplies, motion turns ambiguous.
Travel also steers the substance of landscape: a real desert transfigures into a dream terrain, closer to memory than to any map. Steiger doesn’t replay myths; she dismantles and reassembles them into protean figures, where predator and prey, conquest and fragility mirror each other until they merge. The result is a painting that rejects single readings and weakens the old nature/culture binary, proposing instead an unstable - and necessary - field of forces where the human is not the center, but one current among many.