Subscribe to our newsletter for our must-see exhibitions, artists, events and more here
Shop William Kentridge Prints here

Steiner II

Mikhael Subotzky
Steiner II , 2019
Oil, ink and Micropore tape on canvas
Work: 100 x 77 cm

This series of three works were created as a part of Subotzky’s most recent solo exhibition, Massive Nerve Corpus, which engages with the vulnerability of white masculinity, seeking to tear open the “corpus” of the privileged body. The works depict Rudolf Steiner, philosopher and founder of the anthroposophy movement, which posits an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience. Subotzky was schooled in the Waldorf system, where his father also taught. These three portraits were created when the artist began looking through some of his father’s anthroposophy texts and reading Steiner’s work, in particular related to ideas of race, colonization, and civilization. Subotzky became interested in the degree to which Steiner’s ideology might have been part of his early education. In the artist’s own words: “Steiner believed that souls could reincarnate through the different races and that ultimately a future race would include all humans, but that some races were so barbaric that they could not be uplifted into it and would die out. He was writing about this in the first decade of the Twentieth Century during the Herero and Nama Massacres in the German colonies, and it is not unreasonable to link this form of occult thinking with a political context that fostered these genocidal colonial policies and later the rise of Nazism.” These works depict Steiner in various stages of erasure, fracture, and bondage. “Instinctively I wanted to muzzle him. A man who gave so many lectures on the ‘spiritual sciences’, and whose words are very much aligned with white supremacy, needs to be silenced. So I covered his mouth with surgical tape in between multiple printings of his portrait.”