"MY WINDOW"

Beny Steiner

15th December 2023 untill 15th September 2024

SCUOL - SWITZERLAND

MONDO GALERIA presents “MY WINDOW” an exhibition of limited edition photographs from the latest production by photographer Beny Steiner.

Her art career started as international model (one of the first ones travelling the world over and posing for the likes of Salvador Dalí in Barcelona). She travelled to Kabul opening her curiosity to new cultures and new experiences. Then she moved to New York in the ´80s as stylist for photographer Raymond Meier. There she met her now lifetime friend: artist Not Vital. Finally, she worked as a fashion/life style photographer herself, with a very define and personal style, publishing with the best magazines and agencies around the world. 

Today, together with her cats Mr. Gucci and Prada, she lives and works in Scuol, in the Engadine valley, in Switzerland where she has her residence and her “Four Seasons Studio”. 

Unfortunately, an eye sickness is deteriorating her macula since some years, consequently losing gradually her vision. Life as a photographer has become harder for her, as well as daily activities. As John Milton or Jorge Luis Borges she created her own method to cope with this reality by organising herself around a precise order in her home space to be able to navigate through it. A new way of looking at life with a focus on light and contrast, movement and stillness came together with this new reality. 

These fresh experiences give her a new eye on nature, on permanency and migration, on immanence and transcendence. Her space is one, with her camera. The presence of the Piz Pisoc (the mountain in front of her house) is her way of measuring her daily existence against the passing of seasons and the mutations of Flora and Fauna. And she is ready to capture it, again and again. The appearances and disappearances in front of her delicate sight of what life has to offer, day by day, minute by minute. 

In this exhibition we can see a selection of more than 50 of her photographs. Finely printed in cotton rug photo paper, opening for us a small window into her reality, a poetical vision of a particular place in a particular time, where birds become acrobats and clouds their arena.

curated by Diego Alonso y Alexeja Pozzoni (DiegoandAlexeja).

Exhibition will be open from Thursday to Sunday 12h to 19h until 15th September 2024

Beny Steiner / "Piz Pisoc 05/04/2023"  - Pigment Print on Cotton Rug Paper - 60 x 40 cm

Agil Immensity by Diego Alonso

The Piz Pisoc was quiet. The curtains were of soft beautiful linen, with some elegantly exaggerated repairs. A Kafkian fly was hanging from the rod, massaging her front legs in that manner that flies do. It flew from the window to the tip of her nose. She opened slowly her eye, fluttering her lashes slowly, as if the morning light entering through the glass was burning her washed damaged iris. The other side of her childlike face was lost inside the soft warm pillow. She stood up and looked at the blue sky covered by some passing snow white clouds.
- They are back!- she thought to herself with happiness, as she photographed the rapidly playful Dohles.

The taxonomy of a routinely play between light and shadow, of a contrasted frame of an imaginary reality converted into a spatial two dimensional vortex.

Daily interaction with nature is what brings to us a flare of existence, of a particular reality. Breaking that barrier it's what unites us to our universe. A photograph becomes a prayer to  universal Truth. A mirror onto the void. A symbol of a particular moment in a particular space. It connects the presence of the artist with the cosmic glance of collective subconsciousness.

A peaceful revolution through the impossible reality of the senses. The mountain, still, static, permanent as the body. And the migrating birds as lively agitated Thought, as dreaming, as inspiration. 

The patient order of Cunningham's still-lifes, the spark of Ray, the composition of Avedon, shaken on a dice cup and thrown, randomly as possible, over the table to offer even destiny itself a choice of direction. Beny Steiner´s art becomes a device for us to enter her extraordinary world of magic: of beauty composed with whatever surrounds her and can take a role in her subtle storytelling. 

It is in that moment, when the birds that probably inspired Alfred Hitchcock pose for her, that she enters a state of bliss. All her memories vanish for an instant. There they go, her modelling career, her posing for Salvador Dalí in Barcelona, living with Not Vital in New York, her Afghan adventures, her stylist profession, Vals and Zumthor, all that baggage that makes her vision today disappear into an eternal present for us to enjoy now finely printed on cotton rug paper and delicately framed in black wood.

As her physical vision deteriorates due to eye sickness, her spiritual visualization of the world becomes more accurate, guided by light, shadow and movement, not that of the birds but that of her soul, connected more and more to the wide spectrum of nature.

Beny Steiner / "View Room nº2 14/11/2022"  - Pigment Print on Cotton Rug Paper - 60 x 40 cm