aliS earthart

Alexandra Steiner is a gifted visual artist whose extraordinary paintings restate the transcendent power of natural phenomena, so as to remind humans of our own part in the endless cycles of birth and re-growth. Her works are grounded in the advanced scientific training she received at the University of Vienna (AT) and in her view of the world as replete with the powerful interconnected forces of nature.
Born in 1970, Alexandra Steiner has achieved a following of public and private collectors in her native Austria. As a practising artist, she has developed a technique in which limitless, borderless fields of dissolved colour/earth pigments  frame mysterious and indistinct natural phenomena.
Drawing on her training in ethno-botany, and following extensive travelling around the world, her works explore deeply felt beliefs.
These include the notion that men and women have become separated from the natural world and its rhythms. Instead, rational, intellectual behaviour that developed over thousands of years has created a state of 'mind over matter' that is destructive of feeling and empathy.
Yet humans share the same genes and are made of exactly the same stuff as the planet itself (and most every living form on it) -75% water and 25% "matter".
Alexandra´s profound sympathy with nature - and of men and women as an indissoluble part of nature - informs her art. Her paintings express a mixture of awe and joy. She is fascinated by the 'microbiome' - the human body´s universe of billions of co-existing bacteria and fungi that embed us into a never-ending cycle of birth, propagation and death/transformation.
Alexandra Steiner situates her own female experience at the heart of her work. Her pictures allude to the numinous forces she believes binds the natural and human worlds together but they also refer to relationships between woman and man and to the harmful effects of patriarchy. Her paintings possess an aura that is both mystical and pantheistic. Her pictures invite enquiry; they are puzzling and reflective.

Alexandra Steiner's pictures require time. But they repay study and give pleasure and lasting enjoyment.