Uta Zaumseil - Baby, you can drive my car

About

Galerie Kuchling is delighted to present the solo exhibition "Baby, you can drive my car" from the German artist Uta Zaumseil.

Uta Zaumseil (*1962) cuts her motifs into wood, linoleum and MDF. In so doing, multi-layered and complex prints with a unique colour scheme emerge, step by step, under the artist’s well-versed hand. Strong contrasts stand side by side with subtle, washed-out colour fields and shape an imagery in which time is standing still.

Zaumseil‘s lost and, at the same time, self-absorbed figures, her seemingly surreal architectural structures and wide landscapes reveal a dream-like aesthetics that seems both familiar and but also strangely detached. Whether in a Berlin subway entrance, floating above Frankfurt at night, on the beach or on a remote planet – the beholder stumbles frequently across those delicate narrative shallows that the artist interlaces subtly into her images.

For many of her works Zaumseil uses the lost plate technique, in which the plate is erased little by little, but after each erasure is used to print a different ink upon those already printed. From time to time Zaumseil combines this elaborate and risky method with collages and photographs. Taking photos is like drawing sketches for the artist. With her camera she catches little observations of her daily life whose peculiar poetry and absurdity she carves out, later on, cautiously and precisely in her prints.

Because her imagery is always tightly knotted to here and now, Zaumseil’s works are invariably looking into our present – a look that sometimes turns into a scrutiny that is not free from criticism.

Uta Zaumseil has received numerous scholarships and awards, such as for work stays in Civitella d’Angliano, Hong Kong and the Künstlerhaus Ahrenshoop. She was distinguished with the art price of IG Metall and the Ruth-Huhn-Kunstpreis of the Kunsthalle Weimar. Nowadays her works can be found in private and public collections: in the Museum Junge Kunst Frankfurt (Oder), in the collection of the German Bundestag and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München.

The artist lives and works in Mehla (Thuringia).