Eyjafjörður Pebbles – Alexander Steig im Akureyri Art Museum (IS)

27.01.24 – 26.05.24

During regular walks along the river Isar in Munich, Germany, media-artist Alexander Steig (born 1968) searches for pebbles. Being a trained painter and sculptor, he does this more out of sculptural interest than a geological one. He will continue this rock inspection on the beach in Hjalteyri, Iceland, which he already visited in 2008 and 2012.

For Akureyri Art Museum he conceived the island-fjord-pebble project, which is dedicated to the pebbles of Akureyri’s home fjord Eyjafjörður. As animaging prop, he transforms the stones medially, thereby examining their temporality, referring to their „polish“, varying their volume and exploring the possibilities of their shading. The artist then projects this stone video-technically and realizes an apparently static moving image; in fact, the pebble rotates once around its axis in 24 hours. Steig shows an imperceptible moving image the two-dimensionality of the “picture” and the three-dimensional source are extended by the fourth dimension of time.

Alexander Steig (*1968) lives and works in Munich and Berlin and studied Cultural Sciences at the University of Hildesheim and Fine Arts at the Applied University of Hanover. Steig’s (video-)works examine mechanisms of media control and state repression efforts, touching on areas of remembrance culture. However, he also focusses on aspects of painting (still life) and sculpture (spatial claims) themselves and expands these disciplines to include the fourth dimension of time. In addition to his artistic and curatorial work, teaching and publishing, he is involved in culture-politics as chairman and board member of various associations (Professional Artist’s Association Munich, Kunstraum München, Art5, feinkunst). Since the mid-1990s he has been able to realise over 300 projects, participations, exhibitions and curations throughout Germany and internationally (GB, IS, BE, ES, FR, IT, CZ, PL, BHI, HR, MNE, SK, RS, FIN, NO, DK, LU, USA, JP, CHN, KOR) with the support of over 50 grants, scholarships and residencies in exhibition venues and in public and semi-public spaces.