Jay Rechsteiner
Jay Rechsteiner (born 1971, Basel, Switzerland) lives and works in Margate, UK. His practice moves between painting, drawing, video, performance, text, and object-making, combining conceptual structures with intuitive processes.
For more than a decade, Rechsteiner developed the Bad Painting series, a body of faux-naïf works addressing historical and contemporary violence through the uneasy coexistence of text and image. This long-term project sharpened his interest in the tension between beauty and brutality, intimacy and distance, and the instability of meaning.
He is currently at a turning point in his practice, moving away from the fixed logic of that series toward a more open, process-led approach. Recent work includes blind masks that obstruct vision, fragmented texts, and provisional objects that resist resolution. Rather than working toward predetermined outcomes, the practice unfolds through making, asking how objects bear witness and how material, language, and form shape truth, fiction, and memory.
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