About
German artist Christiane Baumgartner combines the centuries-old technique of woodcut with the contemporary technology of video to reflect on subjects we often take for granted. She asks us to take a moment to stop and pause in a world of ever-increasing speed by making images of simple everyday views such as a ploughed field in snow, a wood from a moving car, a journey through a city at night or a reflection in water. She offers a poetic, objective view of war through her woodcuts of aircraft both moving and still, of explosions in the sky and floodlights trailing an unseen target.
This will be Christiane Baumgartner's second solo exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery. Spanning both our galleries, this is the largest commercial exhibition she has ever had anywhere and is certainly the most comprehensive show of her work to have taken place in London. It will include a new monumental print, Luftbild (Triptychon), which will cover an entire wall at 34 Cork Street, as well as her signature woodcut from 2002, Transall, copies of which can be found in the collections of the Albertina, Vienna, the Museum der bildende Künste Leipzig, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.
We will also be exhibiting for the first time in London the major diptych entitled Ladywood, which was originally commissioned by the New Art Gallery, Walsall and Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, through Art Fund International. Manhattan Transfer, another new woodcut which took the artist over a year to complete, will also get its first viewing in London, after being exhibited in Leipzig and New York in 2010. The works in the exhibition date from 2002 2011 and will range in size from 40cm to 4 metres in length.
Christiane Baumgartner was born in and is based in Leipzig, Germany. She has work in over 50 public collections worldwide including MOMA New York, LACMA, Los Angeles, the British Museum, London and Kunsthaus Zurich. Last year she took part in exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, the Cabinet d'arts graphiques, Geneva and Philagraphika, the inaugural quadrennial exhibition of international contemporary art in Philadelphia.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Following her show in London, Baumgartner will then be opening another solo exhibition at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf, Switzerland, in March 2011.
