Corinne Wasmuht Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1964 -

Somewhere between the digital and the analogue, Corinne Wasmuht’s mural-sized paintings stun the viewer with their enveloping perspectival composition and jagged explosion of colour. Wasmuht’s work finds its origins in imagery sourced from the Internet which she collects, re-arranges, and then paints onto wooden panels in multiple layers, whose detail is apparent only when the viewer comes closer to the work. Layer upon layer of varnish adds brightness to her colours, suggestive of the backlighting of HD televisions and computer monitors.

Wasmuht’s paintings create a unique kind of illusory space, both abstract and fixed in recognisable form, and somehow almost tangible. Repeated shapes and colours in her paintings hint at a sense of mise en abyme, of infinitely multiplying mirrored images, reflecting the vastness of networked culture and a never-ending insatiable yearning for images and information.

Siempre es hoy (2010), a monumental oil painting on wood over four metres wide, is like a cinematic projection, larger than life in dimensions and overwhelming to the viewer with the collected data it contains. Dominating the left-hand area is an ambiguous shape that could be a seated human figure, gazing over an infinitely unfolding could-be cyberworld in whose imaginary planes this being is embedded. Wasmuht has spoken of wanting to step into these spaces, ‘to live inside as in a real landscape… The painting is all around me; it encircles me completely.’

Dissolving spatial boundaries, her work invites the viewer to reconsider our relationships with all kinds of spaces, from urban panoramas to natural landscapes, to absorb a sublime sense of everythingness all at once.