A painter’s rise in the art world turns into a haunting reckoning with ambition, beauty, and the price of success. Now for the first time as a paperback in English

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.