Christiane Baumgartner

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Christiane Baumgartner’s work deals with the convergence of speed and standstill.
Her choosen format is monumental monochrome woodcut taken from her own video stills. She combines the earliest and the latest reproduction processes: woodcut and video.
Speed and the passage of time are recurring themes throughout her work.
The notion of ‘time’ is also embodied in her artistic process, which involves the lengthy and painstaking medium of handmade woodcut, with all its inaccuracies and mistakes.

Compared to woodcut, the digital system of video is a calculable system. Digital information provides the means by which to order and to simplify, and enables the production of endless identical images in different mediums.
Through the use of a self generated line grid Baumgartner simulates this standardized information for use in her woodcuts.

A central aspect of her work is the relation between materiality and immateriality. The ‘original’ image is one of several thousand neutraly generated digital images, not yet defined in size, colour and frequency. Through her selection and transformation of a video still, she creates a unique woodcut that brings experience and weight to an otherwise unexperienced moment.