Spotlight: German Artist Christa Filser Uses Collage-Inspired Techniques to Create Productive Chaos

A fixture of Munich's creative community, Filser is showing recent works in "Perspective and Perception.”

Artist Christa Filser in her studio, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, photo: Bianca Patricia.

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About the Artist: Christa Filser is an artist, gallerist, and cofounder of the Munich contemporary art gallery Filser & Gräf. Her background, however, is in fashion, and after completing a master’s degree with a focus on women’s tailoring, she ran a fashion design studio in Munich while simultaneously pursuing a career as a visual artist experimenting with painting, photography, and video. An active part of the Munich arts community since the mid-1990s, Filser is now debuting a series of her most recent works at Filser & Gräf in the exhibition “Perspective and Perception.”

Installation view "Christa Filser: Perspective and Perception" 2022. Courtesy of Galerie Filser & Gräf.

Installation view, “Christa Filser: Perspective and Perception,” 2022. Courtesy of Galerie Filser & Gräf, Munich.

Why We Like It: Ranging from large-scale abstract acrylic canvases to more intimately sized paper collages, many of the works on view are dominated by passages of reds, yellows, pinks, and oranges. Their centripetal compositions give a vague impression of aerial photographs of modernist structures in the desert, or perhaps on the face of Mars. Made over the past two years, amid the pandemic, ongoing devastation caused by global warming, and the war in Ukraine, the works carry many political and environmental resonances. By offering a bird’s-eye perspective into an abstracted contemporary dystopia, Filser hopes to provide viewers new angles of insight on global issues. Alongside the exhibition, the artist has also compiled a portfolio of selected collages and drawings that may be purchased individually, with 100 percent of the proceeds donated to the Munich Volunteers, an organization supporting refugees from Ukraine.

According to the Artist: “The technique of collage has always been an exciting and effective artistic means for me to deal with my subjective experience, as well as a tool for reframing our socio-political environment. Collage reveals the lively coexistence of disparate parts that find each other to form a new reality, demonstrating how a destructive act can suddenly develop a creative potential in the process. A provisional order emerges unexpectedly from chaos, from which new worlds are born. And so it happens that my works often embody a colorful spectacle of different styles of paper, painting, and objects, a conglomerate of personal experiences and accidentally discovered stimuli from different media, a journey through past and present,” said Filser.

See additional works by the artist below.

Christa Filser, Down Under 11 (2021). Courtesy of Galerie Filser & Gräf.

Christa Filser, Down Under 11 (2021). Courtesy of Galerie Filser & Gräf, Munich.

Christa Filser, Down Under 16 (Green) III (2022). Courtesy of Galerie Filser & Gräf.

Christa Filser, Down Under 16 (Green) III (2022). Courtesy of Galerie Filser & Gräf, Munich.

 

Christa Filser, Space Junk III (2022). Courtesy of Galerie Filser & Gräf.

Christa Filser, Space Junk III (2022). Courtesy of Galerie Filser & Gräf, Munich.

Christa Filser: Perspective and Perception” is on view at Galerie Filser & Gräf, Munich, Germany, through June 18, 2022. 


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