Marisa Baumgartner — À propos — Slash Paris

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. Not medium specific, photography, digital technology, the internet, painting, drawing, video and text are used in installation.

Raised between Austria and the United States, Marisa Baumgartner explores the nexus of being both an insider and outsider. She confronts at once feelings of nostalgia and loss, expectation and longing. 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 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.