With this exhibition, the gallery continues its long-standing collaboration with George Steinmann, whose work inaugurated the gallery in 2007. The Bern-based artist, musician, and researcher is among the leading voices in contemporary art that merges aesthetic reflection with social responsibility. His Mindmaps are
condensations of knowledge, perception, and materiality. They unite art, science, and spirituality into a poetic cosmos that questions the state of our planet.
George Steinmann (*1950 in Bern) studied painting, music, and Afro-American studies in Basel and San Francisco. Since 1979, he has realized international exhibitions, performances, and transdisciplinary projects. His works have been shown, among others, at the Pori Art Museum, the Zentrum Paul Klee Bern, Helmhaus Zürich, LACE Los Angeles, Kunstmuseum Thun, the ERES Foundation Munich, Taxispalais Innsbruck, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, and the Kunstmuseum Solothurn. For his consistent, research-based practice, he was awarded the Meret Oppenheim Art Prize by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture. In 2011, the University of Bern conferred on him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his mediation between art, science, and ethics. The Mindmaps form the graphic core of his oeuvre. They bear titles such as The Art of Collaboration, Raising Public Awareness, or Other Sources. Through writing, lines, glazes, and natural pigments, they unfold a network of thoughts, colours, and chemical reactions. Steinmann works with natural substances such as berries, minerals, and spring water, which he collects, presses, and extracts himself. These pigments preserve not only colour but also energy, memory, and a form of knowledge that eludes purely rational analysis. The Mindmaps are at once notations, research fields, and poetic spaces. They address questions of sustainability, cultural memory, and ecological balance. They demonstrate that art can generate knowledge—beyond language—through the interplay of matter and mind. Steinmann understands his art as a mode of cognitionon equal footing with the natural and human sciences.
The exhibition coincides with the publication of Mindmaps by Hirmer Verlag,Munich, edited by Katrin Sperry and Isabel Zürcher.