David Sterenberg was one of the decided opponents of non-objective art. An advocate of figurativism, texture and composition, Sterenberg created his own particular style. Characterised by outlines, flatness and “inverted” perspectives, Sterenberg’s works recall paintings by children and amateur artists. Still Life with a Lamp demonstrates a distinctive synthesis of the concrete and the conventional. Among all his paintings, with their sharp compositional decisions, his still lifes exhibit a special, delicate mastery. Searching for expressiveness in surface finish, Sterenberg paid serious attention to a number of different techniques. However, these “surface finishes experiments” were not Sterenberg’s only aim in the still lifes, which, in the words of the critic Yakov Tugendkhold, “combine rationality of form… with psychological substance.”