Corinne Wasmuht

Born 1964 in Dortmund (DE)
Lives and works in Berlin (DE)

“Corinne Wasmuth's pictures take one's breath away. They possess, in an utterly concrete and physical sense, an insistent plenitude and presence. Everything which defines the particular nature of this manner of painting is at the same time extremely distinct and ultimately intangible. These pictorial worlds are poised upon the narrow ridge between inviting visuality and forbidding refusal; they combine suggestivity, potency and mysteriousness into one. They draw back from unambiguous categorizations to the same extent as they reject the impulse to yield up the secrets of their complex and engaging pictorial inventions all too quickly and unreservedly.

With regard to the works of recent years, however, the viewer has more difficulty than ever in holding his ground in response to these overwhelming amount of visual input. This group of works, already begun with the pictures Pathfinder (2000) or Gewalt (Violence, 2001), has in the meantime grown to scarcely more than a dozen pictures, inasmuch as Wasmuth sometimes works several months upon one single picture. The works are supported by a fascinating painterly elan: it is a matter of velocity and spatiality, of the subject and its disappearance, of the endeavor to grasp the momentary preception before it is covered over by the next sense impression. The painterly strategy of Corinne Wasmuth  seems in these new works to invent itself anew; or to put it more aptly, a fully new pictorial grammar is developed on the basis of fundemental coordinates which themselves remain the same.”

— Martin Engler, Corinne Wasmuth – On Motifs and Spaces; in: CW Katalog, Kunstverein Hannover, 2006, p. 18