CORINNE WASMUHT

KÖNIG BERLIN
20 JANUARY – 25 FEBRUARY 2018

Corinne Wasmuht’s complex, multifaceted pictorial worlds develop through a gradual, painstaking process of painting which in a certain sense already begins with her sitting at the computer. Wasmuht selects single motifs and elements from a large collection of photographs that she has taken and combines them in different ways until she finds the basis for her new motif. Once the artist has actually started to paint and has transferred the elements onto the wooden or aluminum surface one by one, the image is freed from its digital template and continues to develop through the dynamic nature of its origin.

Despite their complexity and overwhelming, puzzle-like juxtaposition and superposition of different, often very small forms, the works radiate a deep sense of calm, acting as silent invitations to contemplation. They feature urban, often futuristic scenes reminiscent of airport terminals, pedestrian zones and museum halls, yet they are fragmented and overlapping, they appear both sparse and dense. Architectural structures collide with schematic representations of vegetation and human figures, large monochrome planes are superimposed with detailed, crystalline structures that cover large sections of the image like abstract gaps that nevertheless take up space, recalling digital aesthetics.

In addition to fragmentation and restructuring, repetition is another important element in Corinne Wasmuht’s artistic strategy. Single motifs sometimes resurface in a number of works, often several years apart. The work entitled U1 on show in the exhibition, for instance, features an exact excerpt from Uqbar 1 from 2011. By focusing on a specific section of the image, the artist develops a new narrative in the current piece that mines the structure and dynamic nature of the differently rendered details.

The structuring use of spatial perspective and alignment have a strong impact on the compositions, inexorably sucking the viewer into the image.The images seem readable, as well as pixellated, and the human brain immediately tries to translate the dense yet also clearly delineated forms into a real spatial situation or to identify what is being portrayed. The impossibility of understanding what is happening in the image at first glance further intensifies the process of contemplating it. Like a large panoramic painting, Wasmuht’s works open up an inexhaustible cosmos of different pictorial elements that relate to one another, but that also dominate the pictorial space in and of themselves.