Vietta Korren-Steele

My practice is grounded in abstraction and shaped by an ongoing exploration of form, space, materiality, and perception. The paintings emerge through an intuitive process of layering, concealment, and revelation, where forms evolve rather than being predetermined.

Working primarily in oil paint, I am interested in the physical behaviour of the medium and the possibilities that arise through complex colour relationships, accumulated layers, and material response. Veils of colour, shifting forms, and subtle transitions create an evolving sense of surface, depth, and space. Recurring linear movements, trails, and rhythmic structures move through the works, informed by memories of landscape, agricultural field patterns, pathways, weathering, and the rhythms found within both natural and constructed environments. These references remain indirect, surfacing as sensations rather than representations.

The paintings are concerned with transformation—the erosion of time, shifting atmospheres, and the tension between control and chance. Through an ongoing dialogue between response and resolution, each work becomes a record of looking, sensing, and adjustment, where meaning emerges through the material language of paint itself.

‘I have inherited the problem of structure from modernist abstraction but my interest lies in what happens when structure is set in motion- when lines, spaces and colour can shift between states of order,openness, control and spontaneity.’