Chelsea, New York
Christiane Baumgartner
Bikini
Print Center New YorkChristiane Baumgartner: Bikini contextualizes the artist's newest benefit edition Atoll, created and released to celebrate our 25th anniversary and to support Print Center New York's future programming. Baumgartner associates Bikini with swim and surf — referencing the artist's lifelong love and photographs of the spectacular Baltic Sea coast of Germany. Bikini, however, is also the name of the atoll, or chain of islands, used for a vast and devastating program of experimental atomic explosions by the U.S. between 1946 and 1958. This included the first hydrogen bomb dropped by a U.S. airplane. Atoll, like many of Baumgartner's land- and seascapes, captures tension between the artist's meditation on natural beauty and tranquility on the one hand, and the potential for inhumanity and destruction through affairs of state and science on the other. Marshland captures the same view with sharper detail and without the dramatic coloration; while the large-scale Happy Hour is a painted monoprint based on the Baltic island of Hiddensee, where Baumgartner vacationed as a child in the former East Germany (and where travel restrictions closed beaches after sunset). In all these compositions, painstakingly carved by the artist's hand — line-by-line — into a woodblock with a sharp knife, Baumgartner creates space in which the illusion of illumination belies the extreme physical effort undertaken to incise and print the wood. Christiane Baumgartner (b. 1967, Leipzig, Germany) lives and works in Leipzig, Germany, and studied there at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst before completing her Masters in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work, including monumental woodcuts based on her own films and video stills, is held in more than fifty museums around the world, such as The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and the British Museum, London.