3 March 1937, Moscow - 28 March 2012, Paris
‘An artist’s canvases are figurative illuminators, to be more precise, they are the eyepieces of a microscope through which one achieves visual contact with Steinberg’s micro-world. The artist communicates the depth, infinity and variation of this space not just through subtle, colouristic transitions and overlaying colour planes but also using a particular technique – the master paints geometrical figures based on stencils and, like Mark Rothko, leaves barely perceptible whitish spaces between the surface of the canvas and the painted triangles, sections and circumferences. This gives the effect of a solar eclipse, the outlines of figures turning into eyelets through which the colour of another world ‘flows out’. Olga Khoroshilova