maria lie-steiner, submitted artwork
maria lie-steiner
Painting
Munich, Germany
Maria Lie-Steiner is a Romanian-born visual artist based in Munich, Germany. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest under Prof. V. Grigore and graduated in 1989. Since then, she has developed an independent artistic practice rooted in painting and expanded through interdisciplinary approaches. Her work engages with identity, memory, and cultural transformation, shaped by her biographical experience between Eastern and Western Europe. Early in her career, Lie-Steiner collaborated as a costume designer with the National Theatre in Bucharest. After relocating to Munich in 1995, she established an international exhibition practice, presenting her work in galleries, museums, and public institutions across Europe. Her artistic language combines formal precision with conceptual clarity, positioning her work within contemporary European discourse. Alongside her studio practice, Lie-Steiner has maintained a long-term commitment to curatorial and cultural initiatives. From 1998 to 2015, she initiated and directed the Romanian Cultural Week in Munich and co-founded several organizations dedicated to artistic exchange and cultural dialogue. She received institutional recognition, including a scholarship for video art at the Salzburg Summer Academy and studio funding from the Bavarian State Cultural Fund. Her works are held in public and private collections, underscoring the continuity, relevance, and collectability of her artistic position.
Works
maria lie-steiner, submitted artwork
My artistic practice is situated within a material-based understanding of painting that considers color as an active, time-sensitive substance rather than a purely optical phenomenon. I work primarily with oil paint and traditional pigments, approaching painting as a controlled interaction between chemical processes, physical labor, and perceptual decision-making. The mixing and breaking of color is not intuitive but acquired through prolonged practice, repetition, and material awareness. Formally, my work oscillates between à la prima painting and the construction of images through successive transparent layers. These approaches are not stylistic decisions but methodological responses to specific thematic conditions. Even when a painting develops over an extended period, I aim to preserve chromatic clarity, visual coherence, and a sense of immediacy. The scale of my paintings remains deliberately limited in order to sustain bodily proximity and perceptual accessibility. I develop my work in thematic cycles that resist narrative closure. Painting is the medium through which I address ontological questions concerning presence and absence, visibility and persistence, and the relationship between perception, memory, and lived reality. My commitment to figuration is grounded in its capacity to generate compositional freedom and associative openness.
