Christoph Steinmeyer

In Every Beginning Dwells an End is Christoph Steinmeyer’s first exhibition at Galeria Pelaires in Palma de Mallorca. It brings together two bodies of work that are clearly separated in space yet emerge from a shared artistic question: how can painting generate knowledge—both through narrative and symbolic means, and beyond narration, through perceptual experience?

The exhibition is not conceived as a linear story but as a constellation. Meaning does not arise from sequence, but from tension, proximity, and distance. The spatial separation of the two groups of works is an integral part of this approach, allowing two distinct painterly positions to be experienced side by side without explaining or reducing one another.

On the ground floor, figurative works executed in grisaille are presented, broadly conceived as still lifes within landscape. Steinmeyer works here with a classically grounded technique that should not be understood as mere black and white. Minimal proportions of red, yellow, and blue are embedded within the grey tones. These colors do not appear visibly but act as temperature. From a distance, the paintings appear calm, closed, and cool; up close, they begin to vibrate. Color is not seen—it is sensed.

This mode of working connects to a long painterly tradition. In Romanticism, particularly in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, reduction is not a renunciation but a means of concentration. Landscape is not a place but a state. A similar pictorial logic operates in Steinmeyer’s work. Here, landscape functions not as background but as a space of thought in which human experience is indirectly inscribed. The absence of the figure is not a lack but a constitutive element.

At the same time, the painting is marked by a precision that recalls twentieth-century Surrealism, particularly René Magritte. What is decisive here is not the dreamlike, but the semantic displacement achieved through exact representation. Objects remain recognizable, yet their status becomes unstable. The apple is an apple and at the same time knowledge. The glass is glass and at the same time a boundary. The sea is sea and at the same time unavailability.

At the center of this group stands the painting that gives the exhibition its title, In Every Beginning Dwells an End. A bitten apple refers to the biblical moment of the Fall. Knowledge does not appear as progress but as an irreversible act. The apple is already wounded; the moment has passed. The painting does not depict the instant of offer or action, but the state that follows. Beginning and end are not separated but intertwined.

In close proximity hangs Shout to the Top. Iconographically related and likewise executed in grisaille, the work differs fundamentally through its scale. While In Every Beginning Dwells an End demands closeness and derives its effect from concentration, Shout to the Top is more than four times larger and generates a stage-like situation. The painting claims space and confronts the viewer physically.

The title refers to a song from the 1980s by The Style Council. Yet the “shout” is not a cry of triumph but an expression of exhaustion and disorientation. The pop reference does not function as an ironic quotation but as an emotional coding. The painting does not shout—but it could shout.

Also belonging to this group are Challenge and Expulsion, two works depicting the launch of a space shuttle. Challenge inevitably refers to the Challenger disaster. The launch does not appear as an image of progress but as an ambivalent moment between trust and risk. Expulsion continues this logic: after knowledge comes loss, after ascent comes expulsion.

Another group consists of the glass and sea paintings titled Having and Being, Being or Having, Having or Being, and Being without Having. In all four works, the glass and the sea contain the same substance and yet are separated by the form of the vessel. The glass does not operate as a metaphor but as a formal boundary that makes the illusion of possession possible in the first place.

In Being without Having, this clarity dissolves. The glass contains something, yet this something can no longer be clearly identified. Possession reveals itself here as a fragile category—an assertion that remains fundamentally unstable.

Opposing the works on the ground floor, the first floor presents the Encounters, a body of work continuously developed since 2022 through an intensive engagement with perception, experience, and knowledge. The Encounters are not iconographically motivated. Color is not organized as an object but as a relationship.

Each painting arises from the encounter of two color fields. At their point of contact, a zone of mixture emerges that is not added or corrected afterward, but produced as a real and irreversible event. The painting process unfolds as a closed, uninterrupted sequence. It may last only a few hours or extend over up to two days, but it is never paused once begun.

This continuous mode of working requires not only physical endurance and precision, but also a specific mental state—a form of sustained concentration that is closer to a meditative practice than to a step-by-step procedure.

Formally, the Encounters are vertical oil paintings, generally in a 4:3 proportion, constructed from two nearly identical vertical color fields. The paint is applied in numerous extremely thin, permeable layers. White does not appear as a painted color but exclusively through the white ground of the canvas.

The experience of the Encounters is sensory. The eye cannot fix itself on a motif but moves between surfaces and transitions. Color is not named; it is experienced. Green is not a word but an event.

In this sense, the Encounters make practically visible the boundary described by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing between the temporal arts of language and the spatial arts of painting. They can be described, but not exhausted by language.

In Every Beginning Dwells an End is an exhibition that remains within painting itself. It does not explain—it organizes. The separation of the two bodies of work is not resolved but made visible. Both positions can coexist without disintegrating.

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Christoph Steinmeyer (Düsseldorf, 1967) is a German artist and painter who lives and works in Berlin. Graduated in Art History and Philosophy in Cologne and Bonn, his artistic practice develops in constant dialogue with theoretical reflection, an interest that is also evident in his work as a curator and advisor to international collections.

Steinmeyer's work belongs to a generation of painters who critically examine the fundamentals of the pictorial medium and the processes involved in the construction of the image. His language, with its strong neo-surrealist influence, is characterised by meticulous, hyperrealistic painting that questions concepts such as originality, copying and perception. The tensions between what is real and what has been reproduced, as well as philosophical questions related to the psychology of vision, are a recurring theme in his work.

In his early series, developed from the 2000s onwards, Steinmeyer establishes an intense dialogue with art history, classic cinema and popular visual culture. He reinterprets recognisable images, fictional interiors and seemingly familiar scenes, transforming them into disturbing and ambiguous compositions. Using photographic sources from the media, he constructs pictorial collages that oscillate between extreme fidelity and distortion, giving rise to scenes that seem suspended between memory, dream and fiction.

Since 2014, his research has focused on the cultural impact of digital image and the mechanisms that condition its contemporary circulation. Series such as The Most... analyse the role of algorithms, data tracking and the attention economy, incorporating elements of internet culture—such as memes—to reflect on the commodification and disclosure of images.

Steinmeyer's work has been interpreted by critics such as Mark Gisbourne as a way of displacing the traditional categories of realism. Rather than representing an objective reality, his paintings construct internal visions of a transformed, intensified and deeply subjective reality, situating themselves in an intermediate territory between the recognisable and the disturbing.

His works are part of important public and private collections, including the Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf), the Hall Art Foundation, the Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), the Haubrok Collection (Berlin) and the IVAM collection (Valencia).