Born in Järvenpää, Finland 1969 I Lives and works in Helsinki
Soft dabs of the brush are transformed into sharp geometrical shapes in the oil paintings of Stig Baumgartner, whose work is inspired by private experiences and memories. The titles often refer to real people, who are symbolically represented on the canvas as abstract figures. He treats the background as a landscape or pure light piercing through the foregrounded figure to tickle the viewer’s retina. His paintings are infused with a dynamic sense of something having just happened or something about to happen. The elements in the composition variably seem to keep opening or closing, or at other times they stand immovably in place or appear to be on the brink of collapse. Despite their rationalistic dimensions, his works are not purely constructivist. Baumgartner makes no clear distinction between geometrical constructivism and abstract expressionism: both schools of painting have both an emotion-driven and intellect-driven side.
Stig Baumgartner’s works are found in Finland’s leading museums, including the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, the Amos Anderson Art Museum, and the Helsinki Art Museum. He has won awards, including the William Thuring Prize in 2011. He completed a Ph.D. in Fine Arts in 2015 and serves as a lecturer in drawing and perception at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.
For Baumgartner, painting is a dialogue between conscious and controlled versus unconscious and playful expression. He deliberately invites imperfections and deviations that push his abstract expression in a more human direction. Visually, his paintings take their cue from the laws of geometry, while his process is shaped by intuitive choices that endow his conceptual structures with recognizable forms. His figurative abstractions obey the laws of gravity, creating space for a shared bodily experience. In their materiality and spatiality, his geometric subjects also reveal something about how we make observations and how we always look for meaning in what we see.
For Stig Baumgartner, painting is a process of becoming visible. The form and subject find their shape through the process, which invariably entails identification with something as yet strange and unknown. Upon completion, what initially presents itself as an indeterminate geometric composition finally falls into place and in doing so, the identity of the work also finds its consummate shape. The finished work is like a joyful exclamation: This is exactly how I was supposed to look!
When you give someone a set of blocks to play with, they immediately begin to build something. It’s only natural – you might even say it’s an instinctive response for our species. I have thought a lot about architecture; we seem to distinguish between what we call a city and nature. I don’t believe in a separate thing called nature. Everything is nature.
In Baumgartner’s oeuvre, predictable geometry is contrasted with expressive gestures and details emphasizing temporality and the momentary nature of the process. His compositions shine, splatter, shake, or sweat in their own joy of emerging. Each painting constitutes its own significant event while at the same time possessing its own unique personality. Baumgartner’s stylized brushstrokes assert themselves as self-contained visual motifs equal in status to his geometric shapes.