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 © Sandra Mann Foto

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.

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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.

EXHIBITIONS

PUBLICATIONS

RECENT ARTICLES

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JUSTINE OTTO
HEROES & HOAXES

PUBLISHED BY HATJE CANTZ

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Text(e) von Silke Hohmann, Mark Gisbourne

Deutsch, Englisch

2018. 184 Seiten, 111 Abb.

Leinen

24,50 x 29,00 cm

ISBN 978-3-7757-4502-4

ZEIT_ KUNST UND AUKTIONEN

ENSUITE_KULTURMAGAZIN; SWITZERLAND

JUSTINE OTTO

HALBPENSION

PUBLISHED BY KERBER VERLAG

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Text(e) von Jean - Christophe Ammann ( Autor),

Anna Wesle ( museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf, Schweiz

Deutsch, Englisch

2013. 80 Seiten, 

24,1 x 1,3 x 27,9 cm

ISBN 978-3866788084

JUSTINE OTTO

TODAY IS TOMORROW'S YESTERDAY

PUBLISHED BY  Städtische Galerie Neunkirchen and

kunst galerie fürth

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Text(e) von Prof. Peter Angermann, Hans -Peter Miksch/Leiter der kunst galerie fürth und Nicole Nix- Hauck (Leiterin der Städtischen Galerie Neunkirchen)

2014, 48 Seiten, 

24,1 x 1,3 x 27,9 cm

ISBN 978-3-941715-11-0

JUSTINE OTTO

HELTER SKELTER

PUBLISHED BY KERBER VERLAG

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Publikation anläßlich der Verleihung des Kunstpreises 2010/2011 des Lüneburgischen Landschaftsverbandes

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Text(e) von Jean - Christophe Ammann und Verena Titze

Deutsch, Englisch

2011. 80 Seiten, 

29 x 1,3 x 25,6 cm

ISBN 978-3-86678-587-8

JUSTINE OTTO

ZÄHNE UND KRALLEN

PUBLISHED by Nordlanddruck 

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Text(e) von Dr. Susanne Pfleger, und Dr. Isa Bickmann

2009, 48 Seiten, 

25,3 x 1,3 x 27,9 cm

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ART  DAS KUNSTMAGAZIN

Nr. 10/ OKTOBER 2005

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