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Press Release

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Corinne Wasmuht. The show will feature four paintings, one of which was included in last year’s Arsenale at the 54th Venice Biennial.

Wasmuht is widely known for her large-scale, multi-layered oil paintings. Her work derives from an array of pictorial inventions, culminating in an aesthetic tension that aims to reconcile what the artist refers to as the “dualism of modernism,” a melding of representational and abstract structures in painting. The paintings’ images are generated from an array of abstracted and overlapping photographic imagery that Wasmuht sources from a combination of the Internet and her own personal photographs. The images, both appropriated and her own, mine daily life, nature, science and art, fusing into staged abstracted productions. As Wasmuht describes her process, “In a film, one image is followed by another, whereas I pile the images up on top of one another.” Above all, her labor-intensive painting technique characterizes her work. She applies countless translucent thin layers of paint onto wooden boards that have been repeatedly whitewashed and polished, making her pictures shine and appear to be illuminated from behind while giving their surfaces an immateriality that is full of movement.

Corinne Wasmuht’s work has been exhibited extensively in both Europe and the United States. In 2009 she had a solo exhibition at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin that traveled to the Kunsthalle in Nuernberg in 2010. She has received several awards among them the Heitland Foundation Award in 2009 and most recently the Art Award of the City of Offenburg in 2011. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, the Kunsthaus Graz as well as the Kunstmuseum Bonn.

Corinne Wasmuht was born in 1964 in Dortmund, Germany. After being raised in Argentina, she then returned to Germany where she studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. She currently lives and works in Berlin and teaches at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe. This will be Corinne Wasmuht’s third solo exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The exhibition will open on Thursday, March 1st with a reception from 6 - 8 PM and will remain on view through April 28th, 2012. Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 537 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011. For press inquiries, please contact Janine Latham at janine@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.