The Painter as an Archaeologist - Lunch Talk Christina Zurfluh

In her lunch talk at the fortress, Christina Zurfluh laid out the development of her works from 1996 to today, focusing on explaining the techniques she employs. This went from her earlier paintings, where she applied layer upon layer of paint, knowing exactly how she was going to finish right from the start, and then cracked open the dried layers to reveal the ones underneath. She would then sand the cracks under water and put the pieces broken off before back into the painting.

Over time, she would start incorporating drops of fallen and runny paint into her work, as “I wanted to include the surroundings into the work.” Later on, she got more interested in what is revealed underneath, and began covering parts of the paintings with masking tape only to remove it later, forming geometric patterns that let the often figurative background shine through. “I also like it when it’s not perfect, when wounds and little imperfections happen.” This, she began doing in 2005. A while after that, she moved away from the canvas as sole medium as she began throwing acrylic paint onto the plastic covering her studio walls, creating a dense net of layers and layers of runny paint she would tear off the plastic once it had dried and stick it onto paper, a canvas or directly onto the wall. This caused a lot of questions by the audience, who seemed to find the idea of wallpapers made of paint a bit hard to follow. Once the exhibition those pieces are presented in is over, the tapestries of paint need to be scratched off and all that remains are the photos. Christina Zurfluh also uses the same technique to make sculptures, where she lets paint run and drip over a thin construction of wires.