Artist: Christiane Baumgartner

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Cristea Roberts presents Christiane Baumgartner: Sunken Treasure, the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, which presents a new body of work developed by the artist over the last two years. Large-scale woodcuts of landscapes and seascapes are paired with ethereal views of sunsets and horizons as well as previously unseen oil drawings.

Although these works may first appear as peaceful meditations on the natural world, they mark the tensions between nature and human conflict.

The artist began this body of work in 2022 when she first heard news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the outset of her career Baumgartner’s woodcuts were informed by her experience of growing up in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall; over thirty years later, the artist has described the same feeling of paralysis experienced in her youth in Cold War Germany.

The exhibition opens with three large-scale woodcuts that encapsulate a world that is becoming “black and white...vague and fragile.” Melancholia, 2022, Kiss, 2024, and Elysium, 2023, are part of a series termed ‘the outer world’ and represent Baumgartner’s attempt to control or preserve moments in time when the contemporary political climate is increasingly volatile.

For this series Baumgartner also considered the role of the sky and celestial phenomena in medieval times, to forewarn of events yet to come. These imposing works are based on Baumgartner’s own photography of the Baltic Sea, of sunsets that pierce through heavy and ominous clouds. Whilst her pictures revere nature, Baumgartner’s natural world is dystopian and uncanny.

The artist’s meticulously incised lines, when viewed from a distance, clearly depict the interplay of light over water, however when moving closer to the picture, we find that the image is abstracted by the intensity of her mark-making. In In Der Region von Eis, 2022, Baumgartner portrays what seems to be a fading sun from a vague and obscure vantage point, a potential “underworld” or supernatural realm. Carved line by line into woodblock with a sharp knife in her studio, Baumgartner creates a unique pictorial space, where the viewer becomes conscious of both the emerging light as well as the sheer physical effort undertaken by the artist to inscribe the wood.

Baumgartner also presents a new series of coloured woodcuts that share their title with the exhibition. The Sunken Treasure prints form part of Baumgartner’s ‘inner world’ and are also intended to present a view from below. The artist, who has often critiqued material culture and human consumption in her practice, names the variants in this series after precious stones.

Sunken Treasure – Diamonds II, 2024, and Sunken Treasure – Pearls IV, 2024, are depicted in vivid colour, as the artist grapples with human ideals of beauty and value, compared with the limits and constraints of global growth.

In her research, the artist looked particularly to the German legend of Faust, reimagined by Chrispher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In the legend, the scholar Faust makes a pact with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Through Faust, Baumgartner finds a metaphor for the human condition, torn between temperance and greed.

The exhibition closes with Baltic Royal I-III, 2023 – 24, from a series of reverse oil drawings. In these drawings colour plays a reconciliatory and hopeful role. To make these works, Baumgartner begins with a small-scale woodblock which is inked and impressed on Japanese paper - she then draws on the verso of the paper.

In contrast to the stark imagery of her woodcuts, the artist has described this process as “emotional.” Baumgartner’s use of colour acts as a release and her free mark-marking ventures towards the abstract, evoking imagined landscapes, visions of potential futures and unseen worlds.

Through this major survey of work developed in the last few years, Christiane Baumgartner draws into question the notion of stillness in a world increasingly driven by political extremes and earthly fragility.