Corinne Wasmuht

I saw this artist in Art Basel Hongkong.
This is it.

It is painted in wood!

Kathe-Kollwitz Preis in the summer 2014 winner, woman

One picture needs up to 8 months to finish it.

Largest format is 1.97 x 7.15m with a weight of 180kg in 2014.

A Dizzy, Dreamy Reality 

German painter Corinne Wasmuht’s dizzying oil paintings on wood capture the overwhelming sensation of life in our hypermodern world. Wasmuht melds abstract gestures and recognizable representational forms in a glitchy나쁜 manner that presents multiple images overlapping, each competing for the viewer’s attention, yet none of them ever really completely there. To create these complex paintings, which often take the form of large panoramas that overwhelm the viewer with visual information, she begins by using a mix of found Internet imagery and her own photographs to cull loose references to everyday urban life, art, science and nature. But unlike other artists who work with found imagery, it’s not the source material that makes Wasmuht’s statement, it’s the way she uses it. “In a film, one image is followed by another, whereas I pile the images up on top of one another,” she has said of her process.

Part the allure of her paintings is their luminous surfaces, which are activated by the way Wasmuht deliberately and delicately layers thin washes of translucent paint on polished, whitewashed wooden boards. As she builds up the surface of the work, it takes on a glow, as if lit from within or shimmering with subtle motion like a mirage. 

In her latest exhibition at Berlin’s Johan König, Wasmuht focuses on shared spaces of transition: highways, public squares, airports, supermarkets. With the work of Parisian anthropologist Marc Augé in mind, she evokes the loneliness of our ever-plugged-in society, which manages to make our lives more public, yet in some ways even more distant from each other. 

In Wasmuht’s visual world, as in the internet age itself, we are bombarded with images whose significance we may never have enough time or clarity명료함 to understand. We are presented with too much to take in at one time, yet it all remains somehow incomplete. That uncertain space is the new territory that Wasmuht explores so well.  

She makes paintings in oil paint on wooden boards, using many coats of varnish to add to the brightness of the colours.^[2] Her images consist of layered fictional environments that reference abstract painting.^[3] The complexity of her latest work reveals that she uses a screenprinting technique with enamel paints that are oil-based, instead of painting the work by hand.