Christiane Baumgartner (born 1967 in Leipzig) is a German artist best known for her

woodcut Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that ...

printmaking Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed techniq ...

Life and work

Baumgartner studied at the Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, from 1988 to 1994 before completing her Masters in Printmaking at the

Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom. It offe ...

in London in 1999.Royal College of Art Alumni
Baumgartner is best known for the monumental woodcuts based on her own films and video stills, for example ''1 Sekunde'', in which she documented a single second of video in a series of 25 woodcuts. She has said that she is "interested in woodcut for conceptual reasons and not just for the love of the material...it's about bringing together the different mediums of the video still and the woodcut, about combining the first and the latest reproduction techniques to produce an image...." She first came to public attention in the UK in EAST international in 2004 with her print ''Shack'' and a year later with a major solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. She was included in the groundbreaking exhibition at

MoMA Moma may refer to: People * Moma Clarke (1869–1958), British journalist * Moma Marković (1912–1992), Serbian politician * Momčilo Rajin (born 1954), Serbian art and music critic, theorist and historian, artist and publisher Places ; Ang ...

, NY, ''Eye on Europe''. In 2009 she received the Teresa Bulgarini Prize for her woodcuts which deal with concepts of time, motion, velocity and acceleration. In 2012 she was awarded the first ever

Goethe-Institut The Goethe-Institut (, GI, en, Goethe Institute) is a non-profit German cultural association operational worldwide with 159 institutes, promoting the study of the German language abroad and encouraging international cultural exchange and ...

artist's residency in Vietnam, jointly sponsored by the state of Saxony. She began her three-month stay with an exhibition at the

in Hanoi, ''Holzschnitt im digitalen Zeitalter'' (woodcut in the digital age) and finished with a tour around the country's art schools, sharing her experience in the art of woodcut. Her work was subject to a traveling retrospective in 2014-2015, with exhibitions at the Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image Imprimée in

La Louviere LA most frequently refers to Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States. La, LA, or L.A. may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * La (musical note), or A, the sixth note * "L.A.", a song by Elliott Smith on ''Figure ...

, the

Museum Kunstpalast The Kunstpalast, formerly Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf is an art museum in Düsseldorf. History The roots of the museum go back around 300 years. In 1932, the collection of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Academy of Art) was housed in the Kunstmus ...

Düsseldorf Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in th ...

, and the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in

Geneva Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...

; it was accompanied by the first oeuvre catalog in her career. Baumgartner’s works are included in the collections of Albertina (Vienna), the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

(London), the

Städel The Städel, officially the ''Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie'', is an art museum in Frankfurt, with one of the most important collections in Germany. The Städel Museum owns 3,100 paintings, 660 sculptures, more than 4,600 ...

(Frankfurt),

Kadist Art Foundation Kadist is an interdisciplinary contemporary arts organization with an international contemporary art collection. In addition to being a collecting body, Kadist hosts artists residencies and produces exhibitions, publications, and public events. ...

(Paris),

Kunsthaus Zurich Kunsthaus (German meaning "art house") may refer to: *Kunsthaus Graz *Kunsthaus Tacheles *KunstHausWien *Kunsthaus Zürich See also * Art gallery * Kunsthalle A kunsthalle is a facility that mounts temporary art exhibitions, similar to an art ...

Museum der bildenden Künste The Museum der bildenden Künste (German: "Museum of Fine Arts") is a museum in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. It covers artworks from the Late Middle Ages to Modernity. History Museum Foundation and First Museum The museum dates back to the fo ...

(Leipzig), Museum of Fine Arts, (Boston),

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

(New York), Spendhaus (Reutlingen), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden,

Stedelijk Museum The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (; Municipal Museum Amsterdam), colloquially known as the Stedelijk, is a museum for modern art, contemporary art, and design located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

(Amsterdam), The New Art Gallery Walsall and

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

(London), among others. Her working process is largely intuitive. She begins by selecting an image from existing film footage she shoots off of a television screen. The grainy lines of the screen appear in her final images. She decides on the size and frequency of the lines and creates a half-tone image. Then she prints the image and transfers it onto a woodblock and starts cutting. She describes the wood cutting process as meditative and uses the cutting as time for reflection. Once the cutting is complete, at such a large scale she must ink and print by hand, using no press. "I also like the handmade aspect of the cutting with all its inaccuracies and mistakes – this is an important aspect of the final print."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Baumgartner, Christiane Living people 1967 births Woodcut designers 21st-century German artists German printmakers Artists from Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig alumni