Anne-Marie Schneidermann has finally landed her first major exhibition - thirty-six floors above Frankfurt. But the higher she rises in the art world, the more uncertain her footing becomes. Between impossible contracts, institutional gatekeeping, and the quiet violence of professional etiquette, she begins to question what she is really signed up for.

As her carefully curated Impressionist works are weighed, priced, and debated by strangers, Anne-Marie confronts an unsettling truth: the art market values harmony, not honesty. Beauty, it seems, is only worth what someone is willing to pay.

The Painter on Floor Thirty-Six is a portrait of the artist in crisis - a lyrical meditation on ambition, aesthetic fatigue, and what remains when artistic vision collides with commercial reality.

Wolfgang Steih is a visual artist and writer living near Frankfurt, Germany, where he paints and writes in close proximity to the worlds that both inspire and provoke him. With a background in fine art and a long-standing connection to the exhibition circuit, Steih brings an insider's eye - and a critical sensibility - to the relationship between creativity and commerce.
His essays and short stories have been published in german language up to now. The Painter on Floor Thirty-Six is his first book to be published in English.
After retiring from a previous professional life, he returned to the academy to study philosophy - a shift that deeply informs the intellectual and emotional undercurrents of his fiction.
Influenced by the psychological acuity of Kafka and the precision of Robert Musil, Steih's novel, The Painter on Floor Thirty-Six, examines the quiet compromises and aesthetic dissonance that artists endure in a world increasingly driven by surface value.