Carlo Steiner's Fungal Spore Paintings at Gagliardi e Domke

Carlo Steiner, born in Terni in 1957, presents around thirty works created between 2018 and 2021 at Gagliardi e Domke gallery in Turin. The works appear as paintings but use fungal spores as pigment, a technique Steiner has researched for ten years. He collects wild mushrooms, places them on glass plates, and waits hours or days for spores to deposit. The resulting color range spans white, black, pink, and violet. Steiner describes his process as 'controlled randomness,' echoing John Cage's legacy. The exhibition is titled Metaspore by Annicka Yi at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, though Steiner's show is separate. The article also references John Cage's 1959 appearance on the Italian quiz show Lascia o raddoppia? as a mycologist, and Anna L. Tsing's 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World. Steiner's work is presented as a fragment of ongoing research, not a final statement.