Artist’s book design Martina Steckholzer
Martina Steckholzer’s paintings are documentary, deconstructive and poetic. In large-format spatial pictures, she looks at the architectural structures of exhibitions and at stages for contemporary discourse. Steckholzer empties, abstracts and generates space. She uses the most minimal tool of painting for this purpose; pigment, dense or flowing on its application. Lupo Burtscher are both the co-editors and designers of the book.
For the first time in twenty years, Martina Steckholzer is presenting a book, which was designed by Lupo Burtscher in a close dialog with the artist. The book consists of three chapters: A Stage / A Play / The Characters. We carefully combined the format of the book and the medium of painting and give a new pictorial space to the large-format paintings. To represent the idea of the canvas, we chose to use Arena Extra White Rough, a paper with a rough texture similar to a canvas. Interwoven into the chapters are texts written by Jurriaan Benschop, Eckardt Lidner, Elisabeth Schäfer, Angela Stief and Stephen Zepke, which are printed on blue colored pages. At the end of the book an index arranges 445 pictorial works into a prismatic overview, starting with early works from 1997 up till her most recent works made in 2020. The book consists of a total of 251 pages and is published by VfmK – Verlag für moderne Kunst Vienna.
