Horsehair takes a long time to burn" by Rebekka Steiger at Galerie Urs Meile

Vultures gathered around buffalo carcasses and glaciers photographed from a helicopter cross paths in this solo exhibition by Swiss artist Rebekka Steiger, developed after a seven-month residency in Beijing concluded in March. The exhibition features new paintings and, for the first time in her career, a series of six photographs, all traversed by animals, landscape, memory, and mortality in unstable and emotionally charged scenes. The horse, a recurring figure in Steiger's work, gains new weight in this batch of works starting from the Year of the Fire Horse, which began in February—associated with energy, independence, and resilience, but also with restlessness and impulsivity—qualities that spread across different animals and landscapes without becoming fixed as a symbolic system. For this production, the artist began sketching directly on the canvas with carpenter's pencils and colored pencils, alongside her usual use of acrylic paint and tempera, leaving visible sketch marks that would normally be covered—the resulting surfaces preserve the movement of revision, with contours that repeat and painted passages alongside still hesitant lines. The series that gives the exhibition its title depicts vultures around buffalo carcasses based on a photograph taken by the artist herself on a safari in Kenya in 2021, with background landscapes varying between colorful, monochromatic, and entirely abstract.