On Christina Assmann

The artist can express him or herself. (How does this self come to life?)

The artist can convey the world.
(How has he / she come upon this world?)

The artist can make art about art.
(Why already digested food when fresh is available?)

Christina Assmann collects, orders, examines, dissembles, puts back together again, combines and fragments. She tums candles into wax, wax into heads and retour. Pictures are placed inside buildings inside pictures. Everything is tumed inside out and upside down. The ease and cheerfulness with which she works seems deceptively etfortless. In a mood of musical improvisation rather than piano drilling, objects and gadgets, weapons and works are created: an elaborately unfolding repertoire, an interbred and intertwined network like couch grass, clover roots or the brain's nervous system. Coordinating rather than subordinating, functioning "as opposed to" logical consistency. Perhaps like the dolls and bears and tin soldiers around midnight on Christmas Eve on the shelves of a toy shop, these works appear to communicate with

one another telepathically.

Christina Assmann gathers together objects from her surroundings and then retums them assembled. Reinstated, their presence now irritates intruding on our every day consciousness and eliciting new ways of seeing apparently familiar correlations. Thus she takes to pieces the categories of perception we previously took for granted. By unscrupulously joining together parts and materials, new object molecules with free radicals are formed, awaiting their coupling with other materials and parts or capturing sensual and interpreting energies like strange earthly attractors.

Freed of enforced limitations or the rules which given our subservience to technical instruments, virtual reality thus becomes tangible. And this reality of finding the possibly unknown in the familiar, in our world as it is presented to us, years for disclosure.

The usual think, see, hear and touch procedures are avoided with effusive charm. In a way, Christina Assmann's objects become augementary organs communicating joy, pain, tenderness etc., and intensifying the sensations of our perceptive organs. These are uncontrived feelings and her works can hardly be called "expressionist". They appear far more as carriers i.e. her messages are "transmitted".

Christina Assmann's compulsive hunting, collecting and inexhaustible flow of ideas awaken the observer's own unchallenged perceptive faculties. Watch children playing and see the way they have objects in their charge without discharging, the way in which a tree becomes a shipping mast and the way shattered pieces of glass become treasure. Recognize that these shipping masts and treasures and you will know what this is all about.

Andreas Schön, 02 July 1994
painter living and working in Düsseldorf, Germany