Christiane Baumgartner

Opening: Thursday 15 January, 6 – 9 PM

Zander Galerie Paris is delighted to open the year 2026 with an exhibition devoted to the German artist Christiane Baumgartner. At its center is her seminal work 1 Sekunde, a sequence of 25 woodcuts that explore the interplay between time, image, and movement.

Born in Leipzig in 1967, Christiane Baumgartner studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (HGB) before completing a Master’s in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art, London. From the start of her career, she has combined analogue and digital media: sourcing her own video footage or photographs, converting them into lines via computer programs, and transferring them into hand-carved woodcuts. She is particularly renowned for her monumental prints: large woodblocks carved by hand with modest tools such as kitchen knives and scalpels, then hand-inked and pressed onto lightweight paper with a baren. This meticulous process demands precision, strength, and patience, with each print taking hours or even months to complete. Central to Baumgartner’s practice is the contrast between the immediacy of video stills and the deliberate slowness of hand-carved woodcuts. She situates her work within the German tradition of black-and-white woodcut, echoing classical masters while reimagining the medium. Though seemingly irregular, the lines are precisely engraved to reveal the ink’s vectors. The image resolves only from a distance, dissolving into a network of lines up close. In this transformation, the film’s blurred grid becomes carved line, turning the photographic record into a carefully reconstructed vision – an inversion of perception emerging from the dialogue between photographic and print media.

One of the central concerns in Christiane Baumgartner’s work is the tension between speed and stillness: how movement can be conveyed through a single, fixed image. In 1 Sekunde (2004), she transforms one second of video into 25 individual woodcuts, translating an ephemeral fragment of time into a tangible form. This conversion reveals an irreconcilable difference between the viewer’s perception of time and the actual temporal frame behind the work: encountering the series inevitably stretches the experience beyond one second. Distorted by motion, the passing landscape becomes an abstract sequence of horizontal lines that echo both the linearity of her woodcuts and the flicker of a cathode-ray screen. Presented in sequence, the prints reconstitute the sensation of movement – the fleeting rhythm of a landscape seen from a moving car – giving way to a meditative reflection on nature, speed, memory, and the passage of time.

Baumgartner’s internationally recognized work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and is in the collections of institutions and museums including the Albertina, Vienna; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; The Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Bonn; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; the Sprengel Museum, Hanover; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.