Oriele Steiner (b. 1993) is a British painter based in London. She received a BA in Fine Art with Honors from Brighton University in 2015 and took part in Turps Banana’s Correspondence Course. Steiner’s work explores a wide array of paintings 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 – wishing to place whimsical moments on the stage for the world to see, like single frames from a comic strip; whilst her compositions imply that they exist as part of a larger story, tasking us with considering a particular moment.
Her compositions are derived from her very ‘British’ sense of humour – simultaneous, 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 asks 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?”
Her work is the focus of solo exhibitions such as ‘Jamais Vu’ at Hew Hood Gallery (London, 2023), and group exhibitions include ‘Between the Bridge and the Door’ at Pictorum Gallery (London, 2023), ‘Spectrum’ at Better Go South (Stuttgart, 2022), ‘Accessible Art Show’ at Black White Gallery (London, 2022), ‘Material Presence’ at Fitzrovia Gallery (London, 2022), ‘The Body is a Landscape’ at Artistellar Gallery (London, 2022), ‘Safe as Milk’ at Arusha Gallery (Edinburgh, 2021), ‘Complex & Partial’ at Quinn (Brighton, 2019) and ‘While Supplies Last’ at Bellevue Arts Museum (Seattle, 2019).
She was rewarded the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2016 at the Royal Standard, Liverpool, and was shortlisted for the Tagli Mentorship Award in 2023. She was a resident artist at Cawdor Castle in Scotland (2014), Los Artistas Del Cortijo in Granada, Spain (2017), The Royal Standard in Liverpool (2017-18), the Prah Residency in Margate, UK (2021) and most recently the Joya Air Residency in Spain (2023).