Christiane Baumgartner

Christiane Baumgartner is a German artist renowned for her large-scale woodcuts based on her own films and video stills.

Biography of Christiane Baumgartner

Christiane Baumgartner was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1967. She attended the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig from 1988 to 1994, followed by earning her master's degree in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London in 1999.

She first gained public recognition in the UK through EAST international in 2004, where she presented her print "Shack." A year leater, she held a major solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. Her work was also featured in the pioneering exhibition "Eye on Europe" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2006.

In 2009, she was honored with the Teresa Bulgarini Prize. In 2012, she became the first recipient of the Goethe-Institut artist's residency in Vietnam. Her achievements continued with the prestigious Mario Avati Printmaking Prize from the Académie des beaux-arts, Paris, in 2015, coinciding with her first solo exhibition in France that year. In 2021, Baumgartner served as the juror for the International Print Center New York's biannual open call exhibition.

Christiane Baumgartner's works have been featured in numerous exhibitions, including "Taming Abstraction" at gallery neptune & brown in Washington (2024), "Gegenlicht: Christiane Baumgartner – Holzschnitt, Hans- Christian Schink – Fotografie" at Sächsische Akademie der Künste in Dresden (2024), "Tracing Absence" at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London (2024), "The Revoulution in Printmaking" at ALBERTINA Modern in Vienna (2023), and many more. 

Currently, she lives and works in Leipzig and Hiddensee, Germany.

Christiane Baumgartner's Art Style

Christiane Baumgartner's art explores the intersection of motion and stillness. Her preferred medium is monumental monochrome woodcut, derived from her own video stills. She merges historic and contemporary reproduction techniques—woodcut and video—capturing themes of speed and the passage of time. The concept of time is integral to her artistic process, which embraces the meticulous and time-consuming nature of handmade woodcuts, celebrating imperfections and spontaneity.

Her creative process is predominantly intuitive. She starts by selecting an image from footage she films off a television screen, incorporating the screen's grainy lines into her final artworks. Determining the size and spacing of these lines, she transforms the image into a halftone representation. This halftone image is then transferred onto a woodblock, where she begins the meticulous process of cutting. Baumgartner describes this cutting phase as meditative, using it as a time for contemplation. Given the large scale of her works, she hand inks and prints them without the use of a press, ensuring a personal and tactile approach to each piece.