Opening JUSTINE OTTO "Amuse Guele"

Name: Opening JUSTINE OTTO "Amuse Guele"
Start: 2025-09-27T18:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-09-27T20:30:00+02:00
Location: Kreuzstraße 3, 76530 Baden-Baden, Germany

Schedule

Sat Sep 27 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:30 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Kreuzstraße 3, 76530 Baden-Baden, Germany | Baden-baden, BW

Justine Otto was born in Zabrze in Upper Silesia and grew up with painting. Her mother was already very interested in painting. Even as a child, the artist showed great interest in her art books. She was particularly fascinated by the works of Witkacy and Nikifor.
Today, Justine Otto creates her paintings in her own studio in Hamburg. This place is not just a workplace for her, but also a living space - and that is exactly how she wants it to feel. Her nature-loving lifestyle is reflected in her studio: plants and animals are always present there - a constant that has not changed since her student days. Her way of working is characterized by the desire to constantly develop her own visual language. Starting out from figurative painting, she has over time increasingly removed abstract forms from figuration - with the aim of creating her own alphabet and an individual language through forms and colors.
In Justine Otto's work, one picture always emerges from another. Aspects that have already been dealt with are taken up and reinterpreted. She usually begins her painting process with a sketch in preparation for the new work - especially for large-format canvases, as she explains. She then roughly transfers this sketch onto the canvas. It is never final, but merely serves as a guide. She then primes the surface with colored oil paint. A few days later, when all the preparations have been completed, the actual painting process begins: dynamic, impulsive and intuitive.
In quick gestures, she applies and removes paint from the canvas, overpaints and reacts wildly and contrarily to what she has already created. She uses her wrists as a means of painting.
Her paintings not only show a motif, but also the physical effort - the artist's movement. For her, the canvas becomes a storehouse of time, a resonating space that makes something visible and at the same time demands decisions.
In her latest series, from which the work Gang originates, she explores movement and group dynamics. She repeatedly asks herself how their positive and negative characteristics can be made tangible through painterly gestures. Otto's working methods are as varied as the ways in which human interaction can express itself. For this reason, she deliberately avoids recurring concepts. Her choice of titles also reflects her thematic approach: she draws on references from music or uses the names of psychologists who have studied group dynamics on a scientific level.
Justine Otto determines the format of a series in advance. In this way, she creates a clear framework that makes it easier for her to start a new project. At the same time, she emphasizes how important it is to occasionally be forced to do something new - or to consciously expose oneself to situations that one would actually avoid. Such moments open up new paths and approaches that make it possible to make new statements in painting.
There is constant change in Justine Otto's painting. The pictures are the result of a continuous examination of her environment and an ongoing questioning of painterly gestures. Large-format, quickly decided painting takes the place of earlier, detailed figuration - and yet the subtle movements of past times remain perceptible in her works. Justine Otto brings her concerns to the canvas with luminosity, depth and dimension, reinventing her pictorial language in each work.
To accompany Justine Otto's solo exhibition, we are showing thematically related works by the artists Corinne Wasmuht, Karin Kneffel, Rayk Goetze, Tino Geiss, Brixy, Monika Thiele, Andreas Wachter and Roland Schauls in the upper showroom.