Lot 111 - Oriele Steiner - The Cause of Chaos

Gouache on paper
2025
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Marta Marsicka

About
Oriele Steiner’s work explores a wide array of painting techniques and processes, using colour and light as the dominant means of experimentation.

She is interested in a palette’s ability to evoke emotion, whether through its direct, singular use or via juxtaposition and dissonance. Her paintings are deliberately layered with conflicting emotions - she wishes to place whimsical moments on stage for the world to see, like single frames taken from a comic strip; whilst her compositions imply, they exist as part of a larger story, the task us with considering a particular moment. The compositions are derived from Steiner’s very ‘British’ sense of humour - simultaneously comical and dark; surreal yet totally, relatedly human. Fears and taboos leap out of the work, imagery and motifs from personal moments transform themselves in the viewer’s mind, Oriele asking us to judge whether the privacy of these moments is intimate or gross - perhaps a more traditional British comedian would quip “what’s the difference?”.

The series 'My mouth is bored,’ explores Oriele's relationship with food using humour and personal experiences - something artists have done at various points in history. In his painting ‘The Ricotta Eaters,' Vincenzi Campi paints himself as an over-indulging peasant. The humorous composition and figuration of him and his fellow diners is intended to confront all kinds of questions and taboos around the position of food in society, class, and culture at the time. These dichotomies - of capitalism, personal health, and addiction fascinate Oriele, as seen in her recent painting ‘A balanced Diet’ where she investigates her own relationship with these contradictions through the use of humorous, sarcastic imagery.