Justine Otto

Lives and works in Hamburg, Germany

Artist statement

I am many. Multiplicity runs through my work, both as a formal principle and as a way of thinking about identity. Figures appear doubled, fragmented or entangled, forming unstable groups in which the individual is never entirely separate from the collective. My paintings often begin with recognizable bodies, gestures or situations, drawn from sport, archival images and everyday visual culture. But I am less interested in narrative than in the moment when an image starts to shift. A body can become a shape, a gesture can turn into a sign, and a crowd can dissolve into rhythm, structure or pattern. I am drawn to this instability between figuration and abstraction. I want an image to remain readable in more than one way: as a scene, as a body, but also simply as form. For me, painting begins where these readings collide.

Artwork