Focus On | Estrid Lutz & Melissa Steckbauer

Estrid Lutz is a French artist born 1989 living and working in Puerto Escondido - Oaxaca Mexico. Trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and currently residing in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, the intersection between technosciences, nature, and aesthetics has always been at the forefront of Lutz’s artistic practice.

As an artist, Lutz is preoccupied with those poetic zones of contact where science or new techno- logies take their inspiration from organic processes or otherwise enter into a new relationship with the natural world. Her work engages in a speculative aesthetics that allows us to imagine a cosmos where such processes might run their course freely. A world, that is, where the distinction between the natural and the scientific has become irrelevant; a world in which the biomorphic entities we call humans are folded back into the giant pool of nature-technology.

To achieve this effect, Lutz works with materials that are developed for high-tech purposes and that take their inspiration from organic processes. Many of these materials, like kevlar, are thought to be outside the scope of the visual arts and are instead connected to warfare or survival under extreme conditions. By bringing them into the realm of the visual arts in an unexpected and original way, Lutz creates a technopoetic synthesis of organic and crafted materials that is both poetical and critical. It is critical, in the sense that it is a way for Lutz to reconceptualize creativity in a world in which technology and the organic have merged with one another. It is poetic, in the sense that Lutz’s reconceptualization works with distinct formal and textural techniques that speak to our visual imagination. For unique textural effects and to intensify this poetic trajectory, Lutz induces chemical reactions by injecting water or air in her works or by burning parts of the work.

Melissa Steckbauer was born in Tucson, USA, in 1980. She lives and works in Berlin. Melissa Steckbauer was a member of the collaborative artist network ƒƒ, and founding director of the exhibition space, The Wand, she lives and works in Berlin. After a comprehensive focus on pain- ting – she has been developing a body of work on paper, exploring all of the facets and complexities of this medium. Since 2006 she is also working with photography. Melissa Steckbauer‘s intricate shapes and compositions evoke emotions and human connections. Using paper as an „image-bearer,“ she explores vulnerability and the importance of sharing. Her art invites viewers to engage with life‘s complexities.

"In my work I seek a pluralist framework for ecstasy and family that is all in. I want to use an iconographic language that more accurately (and respectfully) describes multiplicities of con- sciousness. What I make is as much about power in sex and culture as it is about shame and empathy as experienced by all of earth’s weirdos (myself included)." - Melissa Steckbauer