The artist, born in Koblenz in 1964, studied from 1990-1995 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Gotthard Graubner, from whom he graduated as a master student in 1995.
Martin Streit is primarily a painter – even if he works photographically or with digital technology. He chooses simple motifs for his pictures, which are usually reduced to basic geometric shapes and placed in the center of attention: mostly fruit, vessels or architecture. In the tradition of Western still life painting, the artist removes the materiality of his subjects through the painterly treatment and effect of light, giving them a strongly atmospheric, almost auratic effect. This also applies in a different way to pictures in which shadowy figures can be recognized as if disappearing into indeterminate spaces. Object and figure, the static and the moving are transformed by means of light and color into pictorial events, each with its own temporality and suggestive power.
Since 2010, Streit has been working photographically with a self-developed mobile camera obscura alongside his painting. In 2014, he installed a 14-meter-long walk-in camera obscura directly in front of the south side of Cologne Cathedral, which gave visitors a new view of the cathedral architecture and the events on the cathedral square. Recently, he has also been creating images that overlap photography and painting.
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