Christiane Baumgartner
Christiane Baumgartner’s (b. 1967) practice is related to her origins. Born in Germany’s historic capital of book publishing, she trained as a printmaker and has also made books. Woodcut is her preferred medium. She is best known for monumental woodcuts based on her own films and video stills, giving her work a sense of movement and temporality. Shooting her own videos, including occasionally filming her television screen, Baumgartner painstakingly renders stills onto wood, creating a moiré effect by gouging out a relief of the image between narrowly spaced horizontal lines.
Chritiane Baumgartner (b. 1967) was born in Leipzig, Germany, and studied there at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst before completing her Masters in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London in 1999. In her works she travels backwards in the history of image technologies, first by making videos or photographs that she transfers herself onto large-framed boards, then by carving and printing them. The topics depicted are often transport infrastructures (roads, tunnels, airports…) which evoke traveling, circulation in space, and also play a major role in armed conflicts; these urban landscapes in which concrete predominates, evince the alienation of the modern environment, the boredom of long journeys and embody the fanaticism for speed accompanying the development of transport in the contemporary era. Her motifs contrast with her use of a primitive handicraft. The slowness of this technique makes an ironic contrast with her subjects.
Christiane Baumgartner’s artistic approach thereby weaves a complex relationship to time, combining a return toward the past, a contemporary fascination for speed, and the deliberate choice of a painstaking technique.
She was awarded the prestigious Mario Avati Printmaking Prize in 2015 by the Académie des beaux-arts, Paris, where she staged her first solo exhibition in France in the same year. In 2021, Baumgartner was the juror for the International Print Center New York's biannual open call exhibition and in 2022 she was elected a full member of the Saxon Academy of Arts, Dresden.
Baumgartner’s work is held in over fifty public collections around the world including the Albertina, Vienna; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and National Gallery Victoria, Australia.
