Anna Steinert

Anna Steinert (born 1983 in Krefeld) completed her Master’s degree at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg in 2013. Her artistic practice is shaped by a process-oriented understanding of painting, in which color functions as a physically experienced and transformative medium. Painting is conceived as an open, non-linear process that equally embraces failure, destruction, and renewal. Rather than aiming at a controlled outcome, Steinert understands painting as a condition of constant transformation—one she deliberately enters and allows to unfold through its unpredictable developments.

Drawing an analogy to the cultivation of a field, Steinert understands the canvas as a space in which organic structures can emerge. Each work develops its own internal logic and visual order without being predetermined. This openness enables an abstract pictorial experience in which perception, imagination, and bodily movement intersect. Her works invite viewers to let their gaze wander and to engage with processes of becoming that consciously resist fixed form or singular legibility.

A central element of Steinert’s practice is her work with masks, which expands the painterly process into a performative dimension. While transformation in painting is negotiated in a non-representational and process-based manner, the masks manifest as an immediate embodiment of expression and action. Their animistic quality connects abstraction, communication, and metamorphosis, opening experiential spaces in which vitality is perceived as a continuous state of transition. Painting and mask exist in a dialogical relationship, exploring different modes of presence, corporeality, and expression.

Steinert’s artistic practice operates at the intersection of painting, process, and performativity, addressing fundamental questions of transformation, imagination, and embodied experience within contemporary artistic discourse. Her work has been supported by numerous grants, scholarships, and residencies, including the Berlin Senate’s funding program for female video artists (2018), an artist residency at Superdeals in Brussels (2018), the Goldrausch Künstlerinnen Art IT program in Berlin (2016), and a working scholarship from the City of Hamburg (2015). She has also received project funding from the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media as well as the Hamburg Cultural Foundation. In 2014, she was awarded the Arthur Boskamp Foundation Prize in Hohenlockstedt together with the feminist artists’ collective CALL, of which she has been a board member since 2012.