WHO I AM
Patrick J. Steiner is a Swiss sculptor and photographer.
He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara where he met the distinguished Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca, an exponent of universal constructivism and a disciple of Torres Garcia. At the 1989 Venice Biennial, Fonseca took him along as an assistant to set up the pavilion dedicated to Uruguayan art. These are the years when his sculptures follow constructivist lines. In 1997, following Gonzalo Fonseca's death, he made his first stylistic turn toward the search for a more intimate and personal dimension of his own. His subjects indeed became more conceptual and his language more recognizable. Until 2001 he made important exhibitions in collaboration with Esther Seidel, German conceptual artist, friend and then wife.
Beginning in 2014, PJS abandoned sculpture as he had studied and practiced it to look, for the first time in his career, at photography. He then realizes several series where Nature is the context within which his vision is immersed, often set precisely in the marble quarries of Carrara, one of his soul places. His peculiar path from the sculpture of matter to the sculpture of reality in motion, through the fixity of an instant, makes him an author who does not easily adapt to canonical readings and frees himself from pre-packaged definitions.
