Corinne Wasmuht was born in 1964 in Dortmund, Germany and now lives and works in Berlin. To create her signature paintings, Wasmuht first takes photographs of dense urban landscapes. She then warps the files in Photoshop, erasing and fading individual figures and details while weaving together multiple scenes. Her work appears pixelated and digitally printed but a close inspection reveals careful brushwork unmistakably crafted by hand; the translation of the image to oil paint on panel is meticulous and can take over a year to complete. Her pieces are often large-scale, enveloping and overwhelming the viewer with stimuli, creating an abstracted panorama that evokes globalization and technology’s hyperspeed of information, finance, and connectivity.
Wasmuht studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and since 2006 has taught at the Staatliche Akademie der Künste Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2014 she received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize.
She has had solo exhibitions at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; Kunstahalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Kunsthalle Kiel, Germany; Kunsthalle Nurnberg, Germany; Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria; Kunstverein Bonn; Kunstverein in Hamburg; Kunstverein Hannover; Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany; and Raum Aktueller Kunst, Vienna, among others.
Her work was included in the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 as part of Bice Curiger’s exhibition ILLUMInations. Her paintings have also been featured in exhibitions at the BOZAR, Brussels; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Staedel Museum, Frankfurt; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, among others.
She is included in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Bundeskunstsammlung, Germany; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Sammlung Viehof, Mönchengladbach, Germany; and UBS Art Collection, among others.
Wasmuht draws much of her inspiration from images generated on a computer screen and from the artist’s archive of photographs of places most of us instantly recognize, such as malls and airports, which are then modified, collaged, and overlaid one on top of each other. . . Alnilam (2015) captures the layer-upon-layer effect of wheat-paste posters torn away from a billboard, leaving a solitary woman staring out from the shreds of color that make up the majority of the painting.
William Corwin, “The Surrealist Impulse: Corinne Wasmuht Alnitak,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 9, 2015
1964 Born in Dortmund, Germany
1983-92 Attends the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
1994 First exhibion at Galerie Johnen & Schüttle in Cologne
1995 Awarded a grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds
1999 Damenwahl: Corinne Wasmuht & Jason Rhoades opens at the Kunsthalle Bremen
2003 Kunstverein in Hamburg exhibits over 130 of Wasmuht’s collages
2004 Wasmuht is invited to create an installation for Berlin’s Deutscher Künstlerbund; her pieces can take over a year to produce, but she adapted her signature style for this mural so that it could be painted in just a few days
2006 Inaugural exhibition at Petzel
2009-10 Haus am Waldsee in Berlin organizes a major show of Wasmuht’s paintings
2011 Bice Curiger includes Wasmuht in ILLUMinations – the central exhibition of the 54th Venice Biennale
2014 Kunsthalle zu Kiel in Germany organizes Corinne Wasmuht: Supraflux
Wasmuht wins the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize; as part of the award, a retrospective of her work takes place at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin
2015 Petzel opens Alnitak – Wasmuht’s fourth exhibition with the gallery
2016 Wasmuht’s first American institutional show opens at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia