CHRISTIANE BAUMGARTNER – LICHT-BILDER
2016-05-23Baumgartner’s woodcuts are based on images – photographs, videos, documentations – found or produced by herself and then transferred in traditional prints using ancient woodcutting techniques. She masterfully engraves the wood using horizontal lines, the structure thus indicating the former image and having to be completed by the viewer due to the grade of abstraction. Baumgartner skilfully uses this abstraction and coarsening of perception to deal intensively with the concepts of time, space and motion, and the problem of depicting them.
The nearly two by three-meter-work Storm at Sea (2013) depicts an enormous wave. Baumgartner used a film still she made by filming a documentary on TV as starting point. The change of medium leads to a particular default, the so called Moiré which occurs when a secondary pattern is superimposed on the primary one that then creates an optical illusion of sorts. To see the work as a whole as well as the complexity of the details the accommodation of one’s eyes is constantly necessary.
Baumgartner also used film as a source for her less abstract series Kleines Seestück I-IV (2011). Through the use of a self generated line grid, the woodcuts seem to flicker when looked at and the scene that has been brought to a standstill appears to be moving once again.
Opposite – Storm at Sea, 2013
Exhibition runs through till July 23rd, 2016
Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
Cologne
D-50672
Germany
