The Davis Museum’s Fall 2018 Season Opens September 20 with “Christiane Baumgartner: Another Country”

The Davis Museum opens it fall season September 20 with German artist Christiane Baumgartner’s first major exhibition at a U.S. museum, Christiane Baumgartner: Another Country. Baumgartner will give a talk at 5:30 pm in Collins Cinema, followed by a reception from 6:30 to 9 pm in the Davis lobby and galleries.

The exhibition presents “an in-depth introduction to and survey of the artist’s work at mid-career,” said Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis Museum and curator of the exhibition.

More than 55 works completed over the last decade are on view until December 16, including photo-engravings, aquatints, and photogravures as well as several of the large woodcuts—hand-carved blocks and hand-printed impressions—for which Baumgartner is best known.

Baumgartner, who was born in Leipzig, Germany, works at the intersection of old and new media to expand the conceptual and technical capacities of printmaking—to push beyond the traditional boundaries of the medium’s expectations and precedents, said Fischman.

“Sourcing images from cinema and television, or from her own photographs and videos, Baumgartner’s images defy print convention,” she said. “Often monumental in scale, or undertaken in extended series, the work is about speed and transmission, about human sight and its elusive capture, about cultural memory and modes of representation.”

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue contributes new scholarship on the artist by Claire C. Whitner of the Worcester Art Museum (formerly assistant director of curatorial affairs at the Davis Museum) and Richard S. Field, now retired from the Yale University Art Gallery, who contextualize Baumgartner’s work in relation to German printmaking traditions, as well as an interview with Baumgartner by Fischman about her career.

The fall 2018 season at the Davis also includes the exhibitions Jacob Lawrence: The Legend of John Brown, Sky Hopinka:Dislocation Blues, A Critical Eye: James Gillray and the Art of Satire, and Daniela Rivera: Fragmentos para una historia del olvido/Fragments for a history of displacement.

Photo: Christiane Baumgartner (left) speaks to student guides, workers, and The Davis Museum Student Advisory Committee (DMSAC) on a walk through of her work, which is on display at the Davis Museum beginning September 20.