Christine Rasmussen: Beautiful Solitude

In her new series, Rasmussen has pushed her exploration of the in-between into new territories. The paintings in oil on panel are larger in scale and more minimal than her previous work and in them we see Rasmussen’s voice growing stronger and more focused in her meditations on the mundane. The forms have been simplified to capture sky and just the edges of freeways. The stark compositions are exquisitely elegant in their sweeping lines, highly detailed rendering, and subtle tones.

One can trace a lineage to the likes of Agnes Martin and Donald Judd in these paintings. Rasmussen has taken the precepts of Minimalism (often monochromatic and focused on the purity of geometry, line, and color) and brought it into the contemporary era. The freeway becomes to Rasmussen what the box became to Donald Judd - the core form of the work to be explored in all its iterations in the search for that transcendent moment. One can draw parallels between Rasmussen’s handling of color and light and that of Agnes Martin’s in her distillation of the desert landscape. Much like Martin, Rasmussen’s quietly evocative oil paintings of in-between spaces are contemplations on our inner lives. But unlike Martin, Rasmussen’s forward-looking compositions use the visual vocabulary of the constructed world to find these moments.

In an era of constant motion and high anxiety, Rasmussen’s quiet and increasingly spacious oil paintings offer a pause. In this respite, Rasmussen contemplates absence, presence, stillness, uncertainty and the sublime in the ordinary. She has stripped away the visual noise and presented abstractions of concrete and steel that hover on the edge of representation. The desert skies become colorfields and the freeways become pure geometry. And yet this deep grounding in reality connects us to these paintings in an extraordinarily personal way.

Christine Rasmussen is an American artist raised in Pakistan, Vietnam and the United States. She received her BA (Double Major - Art Practice and Peace & Conflict Studies) from the University of California, Berkeley. Rasmussen has exhibited in multiple juried exhibitions and her work is in private collections worldwide. Her work has been featured in Not Real Art’s Q+Art, ShoutOut LA, Artillery, Art & Cake and Voyage LA among others. She was awarded a Chalk Hill Artist Residency, was commissioned for the prestigious Artist Label Program at Imagery Estate Winery, and her work is in the Hilbert Museum of California Art. Rasmussen lives and works in Los Angeles.

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