Christiane Baumgartner: Totentanz, Alan Cristea

Christiane Baumgartner returns to the Alan Cristea Gallery for her third solo show. Totentanz provides an excellent opportunity for those unacquainted with the German printmaker to get to know a very serious body of work. Baumgartner makes impossibly large woodcuts from the stills of her own videos, juxtaposing the pre-industrial with the digital.
However, that doesn’t really cover it with Christiane Baumgartner: woodcuts hold a special place in German art. It is redolent with ideas about German history, what it means for future generations, and is inextricable from the trauma done to the sense of national self by the Nazis. Unsurprisingly then, tragedy is a consistent theme in Baumgartner’s work, and picked up here in Totentanz (meaning the ‘the dance of death’), which follows the smoke trail of a shot-down plane. Similarly, works depicting the woods near Colditz are thick with ghosts. Technology, Baumgartner seems to suggest, should not let us escape the past, rather it should allow us to examine its horrors more precisely.