Zeiner’s paintings move restlessly between abstraction and figuration. Forms surface and dissolve within the same canvas — a face, a landscape, a creature — only to shift again into something less recognisable. Nothing settles into one register for long. A figure can become landscape, a landscape can dissolve into abstraction, and forms can change character depending on how and for how long they are looked at. For Zeiner, a painting is not a fixed image, but something that remains in a state of becoming.
This instability is closely connected to how the paintings are made. Zeiner mixes his own paint from raw pigments, oil and turpentine, and makes brushes from unwashed sheep’s wool. The paintings are built slowly through numerous thin layers, with forms repeatedly strengthened, obscured, rubbed back and rediscovered. At times the process is tightly controlled; at others, the behaviour of the material begins to redirect the image. The resulting surfaces have an almost woven quality, giving the paintings a physical presence that sits somewhere between image and object.
Around this process accumulates a broad field of memories, dreams, mythology, folklore, games, literature, landscapes and other images. These are not references translated directly into the paintings, but part of an imaginative ecology from which the work develops. A logic borrowed from a game may sit alongside something remembered from a landscape or encountered in mythology without one being given greater authority than the other. What matters is less where an image originates than what happens when these different realities begin to coexist within the same work.
Zeiner’s practice has never confined itself to one medium. After several years in which painting has been his primary focus, sculpture has recently begun to take a larger place again. This return has also clarified something within the paintings themselves: an interest in works that can occupy several realities at once. A figure can simultaneously be a landscape or an abstract form; a physical sculpture can exist as an object while also suggesting a portal, marker or structure belonging to an imagined world. Across both mediums, Zeiner is interested in keeping these possibilities open rather than resolving them into a single reading.
Zeiner (b. 1987, Norway) lives and works in Amsterdam, where he completed his MA at the Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Instituut in 2017. He previously studied graphic design at Høyskolen Kristiania and interior architecture at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
With this presentation, m.simons brings together a new group of paintings at a moment of transition in Zeiner’s practice. Rather than constructing a fixed mythology, the works remain deliberately unsettled — images in which material, memory and imagination continually reorganise themselves, allowing several possible realities to exist at once.
