rauminhalt_harald bichler
space & content

Creating History

​

If one follows the purely definitional fact that Christiane Reiter puts lines, strokes and marks down on a sheet of paper, then one could describe what she does as drawing in the widest sense.

However, in actual fact, Christiane Reiter is concerned with action in the strictest meaning of the word, with activity per se and with the concentrated execution of the act of self-affirmation.

Layer for layer and line for line, she applies colored strokes in various directions, condensing them into a history in the original sense and in the sense of the German word Ge-Schichte, which literally means layering. In this way, Reiter does not draw; she creates history.

​

A history which tells its own stories. As a receptacle of action. As self-discovery. As self-expression. As something only revealed by what overlies it, which creates itself in a ritualized act.

The pre-requisite and basis for such self-creation is a previously imposed and regulatory framework for action, comprising rules and tasks (algorithms), which liberates the artist from undesired questions of aesthetic and iconographic design. Her whole concentration is directed towards the action and therefore towards the work, which consequently displays this condensed action.

In her research, which is artistic, methodical, and virtually unclouded by any presuppositional knowledge, Christiane Reiter encircles a secret, and in doing so extrapolates those hidden aspects of realisation which in the end (must) remain a secret.

Her works become. In the end, they are. Just as the artist becomes, is and comes true in her acts, in her action and in what she creates, in what creates itself (her).

​

To that extent, her artistically condensed works are not simply the self-expression of the artist, but also a methodical reflection of that very universal human yearning to become and to know what is whole, true and real.

​

Daniel Zaman, 2020

​

_____________________

​

Press Information (in German)

​

​