Konny Steding, also known as Konny, was born in 1963 and is a German painter and performance artist. Her distinctive style is recognizable in her black and white works featuring the peace sign, which she has exhibited in the streets of Paris since the 2000s.
She identifies with the Neo-Expressionist movement, which includes artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Julian Schnabel. This movement is rather broad and fluid, not strictly defined as a School of Painting, with some aspects leaning towards the Punk scene. Its roots can be traced back to German artists, founders of the Expressionist movement between the two World Wars, notably Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz. This artistic lineage, following her studies at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, led Konny Steding to activism, travel, and eventually settling in Paris, where she immersed herself in the Parisian Underground and frequented the Libertarian Punk scene. She is drawn to the streets and the metro, where she practices painting on posters while respecting the integrity of the buildings. An artist deeply committed to freedom, a challenger of restrictive authoritarianism, and a bearer of a certain nihilism, she conveys a profound and subversive message, sometimes illuminated by a
Rock’n Roll touch.
Employing various techniques such as oil, acrylic, and collage on diverse media, the artist expresses herself through figurative, fluid, and free painting with rapid gestures. The certainty of her line emerges spontaneously from an imperative need to express herself with sincerity and total creative commitment, fiercely bordering on an intimate suffering that seems to reveal itself. Splashes of ink become tears, imbuing her faces with a melancholic poetry. She has a destructive approach similar to Marcel Duchamp’s Post-Urban art movement of 1960.
