COLLECTIONS:Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. USA, Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Ines und Jürgen Graf Stiftung, Köln, Museum Angerlehner, Österreich, Museum Franz Gertsch Schweiz (Willy Michel Stiftung), Schweiz; Niehaus Pharma, Ingelheim, Soer Rusche, Oelde/ Berlin; Kunsthalle Hense Bochum; Blobel, New York; Ammann Collection, Schweiz ; Philippe Leeman, Antwerpen; Connersmith, Washington D.C,; Lauer Collection Washington D.C.
Jean-Christophe Ammann in Justine Otto's Female Territory at 'Halbpension' at Kerber Verlag
‘Fairy tales are true’, says the artist. What she does is to intensify fairy tale themes by engaging in a medialisation process that blurs their levels of reality. Through the harshness of her pictures, their implacability, Justine Otto creates a reality that is neither overdone nor pathetic, but that touches a nerve in a present time in which extremes are either embedded or exploding, in which the erotic quality of these extremes appear as extended, atrophied, travesties or fetishes of themselves.
Silke Hohmann in Justine Otto's 'Heroes and Hoaxes' at Hatje Cantz
Justine Otto's heroic paintings work away at the history of painting just as they do at humanity's myths of masculinity. They are broken figures: they stand their ground, but their uniforms, saddle horses, and other symbols of status are permeable or dysfunctional. Speed (2016) shows a rider on he prairie- or is it a German lake welling up under the blue and red sky? A watchful herding dog looks up at the hero, who could be a settler, a Don Quixote or a fugitive. Except that this horse has seemingly unstable wooden posts in the place of legs. 'Speed' of a certain kind may thus be out of the question, but instead we are offered a fast-paced ride though the imagery of art history and pop culture from Emil Nolde to Lassie – and the fragile legs of the horse would seem to serve as an easel. In this manner, all of Otto's subjects and themes are always investigations into painting itself. What is feasible? What is representable? And what are the appropriate techniques? In her new works Otto has emancipated herself from the painter who paints women with a seemingly light hand. In her recent paintings she practices a different form of painting in which she relates figuration and abstraction to one another and makes use of templates. The attention she pays to the heroes is tantamount to a form of liberation, an opening for all of painting's inherent opportunities, things always worthy of reexamination.
Mark Gisbourne in Justine Otto's 'Heroes and Hoaxes' at Hatje Cantz
The sense of the mental search for and a “gathering” of ideas is emblematic of Justine Otto’s creative synthesis as seen in the figurative-to-abstract aspects of her latest paintings. In seeking the material resolution of an imagined inner picture, there is a processing thesis, a new treatment of surface and material means, as well as the distilled potential and existing inner thoughts about what the immediate idea of a given painting might seek to achieve. Unlike the incised moment of a photographic image, a painting practice always emerges through the interconnected unfolding visual stages of studio-based and accumulative temporal processes.5 The painter’s situational response is that of an initial state of resistance that becomes assimilated and progressively mediated. As any handkunstwerk painter-practitioner knows, no painting is ever easily won, and the pictorial outcome has to be (con)tested and mastered in the continuous processing of its developmental making. This observation is significant when we consider the synthesized subject paintings of someone like Otto. The newly painted works increasingly engage with the pictorial sophistication of translated collage, an aide-mémoire, perhaps, operating in the deconstructed interstices between figuration and abstraction.
Prof. Dr. Martin Oswald in 'Entfesselt', Katalog zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung im Schloss Achberg, 2016
HIDDEN
PERSUADERS
Wohnzimmerinstallation
WESTWENDISCHER KUNSTVEREIN
2018
Justine Otto schafft eine künstliche Realität, die voll Härte und zugleich voll Ironie „den Nerv einer Gegenwart trifft, in der die Gegensätze eingeebnet sind oder explodieren“ (Jean-Christophe Ammann 2011). Dafür erfindet die Künstlerin immer wieder neue, ganz eigene Metaphern und schafft symbolisch aufgeladene Requisiten. Der Weg zum Bühnenhaften ist da nicht weit. In ihrer „Wohnzimmerinstallation“ arrangiert sie zusammen mit Kleinmobiliar und einer Serie grotesker Ölbilder eine ganze Sammlung ausgestopfter Tiere: Füchse, Marder, ein Flussregenpfeifer, ein Zähne fletschender Wolf. Als ob es sich zwischen solchen Stücken leben ließe. Als ob wir nicht eh schon, umringt von grotesken Szenarien, überleben müssen. Justine Ottos Bildwelt ist voll davon und wir verstehen sie genauso wenig wie die Welt, in der wir leben. Wer Wärme sucht, ist schon erfroren. Dieser Kosmos hat seine Geschichte längst schon hinter sich gelassen, nichts wird erzählt, auch wenn es nach Erzählung ruft.
Es sind Inszenierungen, die Justine Otto als geschickte Regisseurin eines Panoptikums ausweisen, das Widersprüche zeigt, die sich klaren Bewertungen entziehen, die weder optimistisch noch rein pessimistisch stimmen. Vielleicht bedarf es dafür erst noch eines Begriffs: „Impossibilismus“ könnte passen.
