REVIEW Mar 2025 ‘Christiane Baumgartner: Sunken Treasure’ at Cristea Roberts, London

Jo Manby

Maker of monumental woodcut prints, Christiane Baumgartner was born in 1967 in Leipzig, East Germany, and studied at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (University of Graphics and Book Arts) Leipzig 1988-96 and obtained an MA in printmaking at the Royal College of Art 1997 -1999. ‘Christiane Baumgartner: Sunken Treasure’ is her fifth solo exhibition with Cristea Roberts Gallery, on show until 8 March 2025. Here, the Fourdrinier Editor Jo Manby returns to writing about her work two decades after reviewing Baumgartner’s solo at Ikon, Birmingham.

Flanking the doorway at Cristea Roberts, Sunken Treasure – Pearls II (2024), a buoyant flaring image, is positioned opposite the black and white sunset In der Region von Eis III (2022), a woodcut on Kozo paper of equal dimensions. At the top of the gallery, some distance away, Melancholia (2022), named for the apocalyptic Lars von Trier film that references the director’s own depressive illness, assumes a static equilibrium between passages of brightness and areas of profound shadow. These prints measure almost two metres in height and one and a half metres wide. Close-to, the images can’t easily be read; at a distance, the subject falls into place. Consequently, the whole exhibition is imbued with an elusive, shifting movement as the visitor proceeds through the gallery.

The new body of work made for ‘Sunken Treasure’ was created over the past three years, and was initiated when Baumgartner first received news of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Her first woodcuts at the beginning of her career were similarly instilled with the angst she experienced growing up in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. While her work can appear becalmed and evanescent, it is steeped in a sense of unease and at times existential despair. In ‘Sunken Treasure’, monochrome or delicately coloured shimmering rectangles depicting dazzling light effects appear to emerge from the white walls of the gallery space to produce a calmness and radiance that dissolves on approach. The woodcutting process employed by the artist is one that embodies many hours of intensive physical labour, an industry belied by the ethereal nature of the final prints.

Presented in ‘Sunken Treasure’ is a collection of fifteen prints, ranging from seven large woodcuts on Kozo paper approximately 2m x 1.5m each dating from between 2022 and 2024, and the slightly smaller Andromeda (2024) and Süderende (2023), to three separate works entitled Lighthouse (2025), each in an edition of six monoprints; the two sets of reverse drawings, Baltic Royal I (2023) and Baltic Royal III (2023) comprising 16 sheets each of oil on Japanese paper; and finally the intimate, ephemeral, mauve-tinted Small Fog (2024), a woodcut on Shiohara Japanese paper in an edition of 20.

The febrile broken lines of her images, incised into the wood block with a sharp knife in her studio, have been compared to the static of old analogue television sets. At the end of broadcast, sometime around midnight, viewers used to be left with a haze of animated silver static. Growing up in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this would have been a protracted experience as the regime prohibited much of the more advanced technology available to the West.

I wondered whether Baumgartner set out to achieve a sense of timelessness (for example the fusion of the static TV screen effect with the antique printing method) or whether she arrived at it by default of the process she was employing, and then went on to develop it as a kind of aesthetic asset. ‘My work is indeed connected to a sense of timelessness. I return to certain motifs, transforming them away from the digital and back towards the analogue.’

Had Baumgartner been influenced by Albrecht Dürer? What was her first experience of seeing his work and that of other woodcut artists?

For the Lighthouse works (Lighthouse – green (2025) is pictured here), each printed on Misumi Japanese paper, Baumgartner inks the matrix in separate layers, applying colour first, followed by black. The artist partially wipes off the black ink before carefully registering the final layer, revealing the colour beneath to create a bold, graffiti-esque line. Each print in the edition of six is therefore a monoprint, dependent on the varying movement of the artist’s hand.

Baumgartner uses oil-based inks with a linseed oil base. I asked if she could describe to me the feeling she had when she lifted the paper off an inked woodblock, and whether the experience or the emotion was different to the response she had towards the primary source of inspiration for the work.

Melancholia, Kiss (2024) and Elysium (2023), hung in consecutive order, are part of a series Baumgartner describes as concerning ‘the outer world’, and relate to an instinctual desire to capture moments in time during a hostile political climate. Using her own photographs and video stills of the Baltic coastline as source material, an area which was the only place she and her family could go on holiday due to restricted movement under occupied East Germany, the afternoon sun piercing the clouds above a sea teeming with mutability becomes ominous and dystopian. Are all the works depicting light and sea based on sunset or are any of them sunrises or other times of day? ‘Only In der Region von Eis, 2022, and Sunken Treasure, 2024, are sunsets,’ Baumgartner explained. ‘All the other woodcuts in the exhibition are based on photographs I took in the daytime. Some of them show the sky in the winter months when the sun is low.’

In other works, the Baltic seaside becomes an emotional landscape that addresses what Baumgartner terms inner worlds. The Sunken Treasure prints that share their title with that of the exhibition allow a glimpse from below the sea. Light, instead of radiating from a glaringly bright sun (its dazzle formed simply of blank paper), or scintillating on the surface of the sea, is caught in these prints in the form of luminous underwater spheres. The subtitles of these works reference jewels and precious stones – pearls and diamonds.

Literary inspiration behind the Sunken Treasure works comes in the form of the Germanic archetype common to works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Christopher Marlowe, in which the scholar Faust makes a deal with the devil, selling his soul for infinite knowledge and all the world’s riches. I asked Baumgartner how she first came across the legend. Was it embedded in childhood stories that she grew up with or learned at school? ‘It was part of the curriculum in secondary school in East Germany,’ says Baumgartner. ‘We had to act out different scenes and learn parts of the text by heart. I was Mephisto. I still know parts of the text to this day.’ I wondered whether there was a spiritual aspect to her work, the sense of a Christian or other religious influence, thinking of the binaries of light/dark and Faustian good/evil, or whether it is more that her work draws on a general European cultural heritage:  ‘I am influenced by our present, which contains enough Faustian good and evil,’ said Baumgartner. ‘I also have a deep love of nature and feel its great loss because of humanity.’

Cinematic inspiration, as mentioned, can be traced in the work Melancholia, touching upon the Lars von Trier film that is dominated by the pale shimmer of the hauntingly beautiful but deadly rogue planet that finally collides with Earth. I asked Baumgartner about the celestial events she is said to be intrigued by. Are they phenomena such as eclipses or the movement of stars? ‘I am fascinated by the sky and the movement up there. For example, on the Baltic Sea beach you can see countless shooting stars in summer. It's not just the stars that interest me though, it’s also the many man-made celestial bodies, such as satellite trains that pierce the night sky, their use giving a small number of people enormous power.’ Again, the uncontrolled greed and consumption of the world’s human population is unmistakeably being critiqued here. It appears that the way she processes her despair at the human impulse for destruction and concomitantly, inadvertent nihilism, is by spending time in the studio, vast swathes of time set apart from social interaction, carving out her intricate woodblocks to create these exquisite expressions of emotional responsiveness.

While the general tone of the exhibition is one of sombre reflection, the two sets of Baltic Royal reverse drawings (16 individual works each, 32 in total) displayed in a grid format on the long wall of the gallery, sound a note of optimism. For these works, Baumgartner has released her use of colour and texture from the strict self-imposed rules that characterise the main body of the woodcut prints. Instead, the artist has created a small woodblock for each piece, inked it up and laid Japanese paper onto it – and has then drawn onto the verso of the paper. These works have a delicate, gentle aspect and evoke fleeting impressions of meadows and moorlands, with an emphasis on hues of violet, plum and moss green and a flurry of loose, brush like mark making. As yet unseen landscapes filled with tenderness and hope.

The woodcutting process is probably the earliest type of multiple image reproduction. In her prints, Baumgartner succeeds in merging the briefest of occurrences with long, deliberate hours of labour – all within a centuries-old process. Thus, Baumgartner captures time and space in a graphene-thin layer that hovers between the image and the viewer, appearing to amalgamate multiplicity and complexity within the painstaking, labour intensive lattice of her prints. This conjuring trick has the capacity to hold the world in its circumference, and invites us to participate in that age-old dance of stepping in close to marvel at minute detail and standing back to contemplate its effect at a distance.