Paula Oltmann - Phantastic Landscapes
21
I wanted to paint a landscape
It started out randomly, without thinking, I was listening to music
The music took me to another place
How can I make something as transformative as music […]
Quote: Kim Gordon, Northhampton, Massachusetts 2007, in: Paul Thek. Artist‘s Artist, hg. v. Harald Falkenberg, Peter Weibel, Karlsruhe 2008.
Paula Oltmann's installations are permeated by the increasingly strong influence of digital image cultures. Sometimes they appear at first to be natural and then turn out to be artificial, sometimes it is the other way round. They form fragmentary phantasms of a fictitious landscape, some of which have been created by an artificial intelligence, a machine, and are subject to strange transformations.
The title Phantastic Landscapes already contains a reference to the fantastic, a fictional image of nature, with which Oltmann questions the semantic concept of the term "landscape" in general. In her work, Oltmann examines the natural landscape as a body and specifically questions the topicality of the classical concept of nature. In doing so, she uses organic "natural materials" such as wax and wood, but also plastics and digital imaging processes.
Landscapes are not and have never been fixed; they have been subject to exponentially increasing man-made change since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The image of a landscape, the imitation of a real, visible section of nature, as shaped particularly by the epoch of Romantic painting, has been permanently incorporated into the general understanding of an ideal-typical, i.e. untouched, natural landscape, and persists to this day.
The gap that opens up between appearance on the one hand and cognition on the other allows a sphere of disquiet to enter. Fantasticism is therefore related to areas of the seemingly uncontrollable, the intangible, and is in turn representative of processes in which we are confronted with a sense of powerlessness and dependence.
------
Paula Oltmann (*1997 in Kiel) completed her Bachelor's degree in Art and German Studies with Antje Majewski at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in 2022 and is currently studying for her Master's degree with Ina Weber at the UdK Berlin.
Exhibitions (selection):
Group exhibition "Game Trails", Galerie Cubeplus, Kiel, 2022. Group exhibition "Retreat", Off Space Fabrikstraße Kiel, 2022. Solo exhibition "Digging into the Future", PrimaKunst, Kiel, 2021. Group exhibition "ROSAGRUEN", Atelierhaus im Anscharpark, Kiel, 2020.
