Marcus Steffen:
At the beginning of 2014 I decided to turn my passion, painting, from a vocation into my profession. The intensive examination of the question of drawing satisfaction from my daily work, the desire, the longing to be able to live out my creative potential, the necessity to allow the explosion of creativity, were incisive thoughts that matured inwardly for a long time, but which I only allowed to happen to myself at the end of 2013.
The decision to focus on painting suddenly opened up a new level of creative energy, which discharges itself in my paintings, pulls the viewer into the paintings and can release energy - if the viewer allows it.
Through object art and the painting and design of stage sets I found my way into painting early in my youth. In the beginning, I oriented myself towards my inner images of nature and landscape, but in the past decade I have found my way more and more into abstract painting as an expression of my more mature personality. I don't paint landscape and nature, but a picture is created as an expression of my inner empathy.
As an autodidact, who has refined and developed his individual style over many years, I live in each new work and let my personality speak through the sometimes very extroverted, sometimes reserved and discreet language of colors.
In my "Serie-Klein", only abstract structures and rich, bright colors stand out at first glance. If you get closer to the canvas, look more closely and get intensively involved in this multi-layered painting, you will discover layers of color full of pulsating energy, which create a third dimension. Overlapping, sometimes pasty, sometimes glazed surfaces - overlapping layers of color, which nevertheless relate to each other in rhythmic tension.
The effect of the pulsating energy of my paintings is even more apparent in my large-format works. Here, depending on the light, the viewing angle and the interaction of the picture with its surroundings, the viewer is presented with different, never fading widths and depths.
I was born in Braunschweig in 1966, am married, father of a daughter and live and work in the West of Hamburg.
