Half Board

The world of Justine Otto (born 1974) is inhabited by girls, women and animals. The painterly handwriting is merciless, the iciness brutal. Even when the landscape is turning green, the temperature remains at the freezing level. The pictures’ intrinsic metallic appearance alters the protagonists into beings for whom nothing, absolutely nothing is foreign. They locate their actions with inquisitiveness, torturous, perhaps even sadistic, but always mysterious, in a no-man’s land without orientation. Her painting generates the emotional, dissecting undercooling of the female figures up to the aggressivity of the animals. For their part, the interacting figures reflect a desire that determines the actions. These, in turn, are mysterious, probes in the realm of shadows that lends alchemistic traits to the experience of an “uncanny” knowledge. Justine Otto creates a reality by way of her pictures’ hardness, their inexorability that is neither exaggerated nor melodramatic but instead coldly touches the nerve of a present in which contradictions are either leveled or explode.

The exhibition at the Museum Franz Gertsch is Justine Otto’s first in Switzerland. Large and small-format oil paintings the past five years are on display.

The exhibition was curated by Jean-Christophe Ammann and Anna Wesle in collaboration with the artist.