L MD 44, rue Barbet de Jouy F-75007 Paris France
PARIS – L MD galerie is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Marisa Baumgartner in France. Encompassing both the exterior and interior of the gallery, the show features photographic wall installations and large works on paper. The show will be on view from May 6 through June 13, 2009.
Marisa Baumgartner will create a photographic installation on the front glass façade of the gallery and the interior back wall. Composed of thousands of individual dots, these large installations create an environment that forms spatial relationships with the rest of her work. A moiré of dots both obstructs and reveals an image. When viewed from a distance, the exterior view reveals an image of a city obstructed by trees. Distant and ephemeral, it creates a dreamlike context in which to enter the gallery. In contrast, the main room features a second wall installation of a car’s headlights heading directly towards the viewer, reversing the gaze and confronting the viewer with feelings of objectification and vulnerability. Masked by the beauty of color and the digital medium, her language of dots and grids fuses Pop with Minimalism.
The main exhibition space hosts 6 large works on paper. Named according to their date and referred to by the artist as “Overpaints,” this new work continues Marisa Baumgartner’s exploration of images culled from public domain webcams. These appropriated images are taken from live Internet feed of ubiquitous cameras that sit worldwide, watching history moment for moment. These webcams are the “objective eye,” suspicious in their gaze with a sinister idea of codifying life. The gaze is unyielding, voyeuristic and removed.
In the Overpaints series, she paints the images “out” using white acrylic or black gouache.
The human hand re-infuses them with emotion and sentimentality. These forms become meditations on the historic white and black paintings of Minimalism.
The subjects in the images are symbolic, architectures of power. The mountain peak, the skyscraper, the monument become formalizations of both the geological sediment and emotional sentiment of our lives. The black city views represent emptiness and the void as well as recalling images of destruction and speak of the fragility of life in the built environment. In contrast, the white snowscapes of her familiar age-old mountains in the Alps symbolize stability, strength and history.
Marisa Baumgartner’s work investigates space, both concrete and conceptual, that exists within the vacuums of history, memory and idealism. Her images focus on the void, on the emptiness present in photographic images and the hidden/shadowy sentiments behind them.
Raised between Austria and the United States, Marisa Baumgartner explores the nexus of being both an insider and outsider. To view the modern condition mediated in pixels and parts, where each light in a nightscape represents a life, where a world can be traveled through a computer screen. She confronts at once feelings of nostalgia and loss, expectation and longing.
Marisa Baumgartner was born in 1980 in Washington DC, USA. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 and her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 2006. She currently resides in New York City.