Alfred Steiner

My paintings and drawings seek to seduce the viewer by transforming grotesque or distasteful content into sensuously pleasurable forms.

In my ballpoint pen drawings, I improvise tangles of dismembered anatomy — muscles, bones, eyes, noses, etc. But under close observation, these initially disturbing anatomical permutations reveal subtle variations in line quality, through which the observant viewer may derive vicarious pleasure associated with mark-making.  The compositions of these works are often drawn from art-historical and pop-cultural sources, especially those with a penchant for the grotesque — from Hieronymus Bosch to Homer Simpson.

My paintings are landscapes populated with toys, cocktail novelties and other fantastic structures made from petroleum byproducts, together with feces, dildos, rotting teeth and other unmentionables.  By rendering this objectionable subject matter with the luminous skin of glazed oil paint, I invite the viewer to consider whether the abject can become beautiful.

My conceptual works often follow a similar logic of aesthetic transmutation.  They typically begin with a sensuous material — like glass or wool — which is then converted into its antithesis — like bubble wrap or a coyote.  Sometimes the transformation revolves around the material’s function.  In the case of the Anti-paparazzi Shirt, a material made to make its wearer highly visible (e.g., for graveyard-shift road-repair crews) is used to make its wearer effectively invisible to flashing cameras.

Ultimately, creating these works is a process of redemption:  Making the Repugnant sublime, the Established subversive and the Precious cheap.