Christine Wahl

In the work of Christine Wahl, it is the everyday life of women, the situations in which they work and interact, that we find brought to prominence again and again – for instance, in her portraits of female university students or workers at the state-owned candy manufactory VEB Dresdner Süßwarenfabriken Elbflorenz. This choice of subject may well have its source in the artist’s own history.

Born 1935 in Glashütte, Christine Wahl after 1945 helped her mother carry on the engraving business founded by her father, who fell in the Second World War. From 1953 to 1958, she studied the graphic arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden and has lived since 1958 as an independent artist in Dresden-Blasewitz. In her drawings from the 1960s, the influence of her two teachers, Hans Theo Richter and Max Schwimmer, is unmistakable – Wahl conveys her subjects and situations with an assured hand, her strokes intimating movement and quiet concentration at once.

Her first research journey in 1961 took her to Sweden; later, she also went to Poland, Bulgaria, and Umbria. In the print workshop of Herbert Tucholski in Berlin, and through her 1965 apprenticeship in the print workshop of the GDR Verband Bildender Künstler (Association of Visual Artists) in Dresden, Wahl deepened her knowledge of the graphic arts techniques. In order to remain independent of state art commissions, she interrupted her status as free-lance artist from 1962 to 1966 to study English at the Karl-Marx University in Leipzig and later worked as interpreter.

The etchings Gespräch (Discussion, 1970) and Studenten (Students, 1975) are presumably to be interpreted as a reminiscence of Wahl’s period as a student. At the same time, these works testify to her artistic emancipation and the self-assured development of her own vocabulary of forms, one that leaves the heavy line behind and favors a stroke that conveys motion and openness. From this point forward, Wahl’s divers drawings are dominated by a dynamic tissue of lines, out of which she causes her figures and subjects graphically to emerge and take action. Her range of motifs is expanded to include still lifes and landscapes. Her drawings place female figures prominently in the public space, integrate them into landscapes, or juxtapose them with cityscapes.

Since that time, Wahl has produced a continuous series of works almost expressionist in their style – drawings and watercolors, but especially works that make use of the whole gamut of graphic arts techniques: from the powerful woodcuts of the 1970s to her most recent, frequently colored etchings, in which she records incisive perspectives on her extensive travels and the world around her.

Through 1990, Christine Wahl was a member of the GDR Verband der Bildenden Künstler (Association of Visual Artists); later, she was a member of the Bundesverband Bildender Künstlerinnen und Künstler des Sächsischen Künstlerbundes (Federal Association of Visual Artists of the Artists’ Union of Saxony). Her works have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions and acquired for numerous public collections.

Text: Anke Paula Böttcher, translation: Darrell Wilkins