Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Corinne Wasmuht. The show will feature three new paintings and a mural. A catalogue with an essay by Zdenek Felix will be published on the occasion.

Wasmuht is widely known for her large-scale, multi-layered paintings. Her work derives from an array of pictorial inventions, culminating in a kind of aesthetic tension that aims to reconcile what the artist refers to a the “dualism of modernism.” For her pictorial ideas, the artist chooses from a continuously maintained archive of images of daily life, nature, science and art. In her paintings these images, both appropriated and her own, fuse into staged productions with references to contemporary contexts. Often lacking any one-point perspective and layered with images and color, the paintings generate an excess visibility and density that disallow the viewer any firm ground or solid perception. Because the space of the observer is at odds with the pictorial space, the viewer is compelled to follow the variable shifts of the images and colors as they come forth and recede.

In one of the exhibition’s paintings entitled “Barrier” (see image above), Wasmuht has gathered together found images from numerous situations, including what appears to be a path or roadway. The “path” at once draws the viewer into the work but an inherent and arguably bewildering inapproachability thwarts this attempt with a sudden shift to a new image fragment. Just as the title suggests, there is a barrier to a holistic apprehension of the painting, replaced instead with ever-shifting imagery and color, as though watching a film. In fact, projections and illuminations play a role in Wasmuht’s oeuvre, as the size and proportions of her works often approximate those of cinematic screens. However, in the case the artist’s work, this “technical world” is not lit up with an illusionistic continuity but a discontinuity that confounds the descriptive, revealing a distinct pictorial world, one that is ultimately mysterious and intangible in nature.

Wasmuht’s work has been exhibited in both Europe and the United States. In 2006 she had a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Hannover, and her work was included in group exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bremen (Bremen), the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) and the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus).

Wasmuht was born in 1964 in Dortmund, Germany. Raised in Argentina, she then returned to Germany where she studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. She currently lives and works in Berlin.