Marius Steiger: Marginalia

Jiayuanhai Art Museum is pleased to present Marginalia, a new exhibition by London-based Swiss artist Marius Steiger. Established in 2023 and designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, Jiayuanhai Art Museum is a newly founded public institution dedicated to contemporary art in Shanghai. About Marginalia takes its title from the notes left by readers in the margins of books: unofficial, unauthorised, beside the point. For this exhibition, Steiger has constructed two thin white walls standing in the middle of the room and dividing the space. Presenting a white facade to the viewer while revealing an exposed metal structure behind, the walls make the apparatus of display explicit: a surface that presents itself as neutral while the construction that holds it up remains openly visible. The works presented belong to Steiger’s new Display (Archive) series: assemblages of individually painted panels depicting postcards, photographs, and found images, mounted within a minimalist black grid. Together, they function as a personal atlas, a painted archive in which images are brought into proximity through simple acts of juxtaposition. The source material is largely personal: postcards from Steiger’s own collection and the vast archive inherited from his grandparents, combined with images drawn from his travels, daily life, and wider visual culture. Displaced from their original contexts and placed in the company of others, these images accumulate into fictional inventories that belong to no single time, place, or person. New narratives and personas form between images that never shared a shelf. New stories emerge from old pictures. Hovering between archive and fiction, these works belong fully to neither. The exhibition also includes two works that push the logic of the series in distinct directions. Timeline (2026) arranges four postcards along an extremely narrow vertical canvas, a format that mimics the chronological ordering of a timeline while resisting it entirely. Postcards circulate out of sequence, arrive late, and survive their moment. The narrow strip holds them in place but cannot fix their meaning. Legacy Systems (2026) takes the structure further into abstraction: black rectangular panels functioning simultaneously as shelves and redacted images, with two postcards placed on top. The images persist quietly against the weight of everything around them. Something has been kept, something set aside. Rooted in the tradition of still life painting and its more charged subcategory, the vanitas, Steiger’s works treat the postcard as an unstable document: an image produced for circulation, traversed by distance and time, and resistant to the narrative closure that every archive promises and never delivers. Like Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas, in which photographic reproductions of artworks, newspaper images, and advertising were arranged on black cloth panels to map the survival of visual forms across time and culture, Steiger’s assemblages operate through association and memory rather than argument. Against the black grid, images from different eras and registers are held in equal authority: the personal and the historical, the beautiful and the disposable, the inherited and the found. […] Read more Toggle Painting