Who­ever wants to grasp the work of Christa Manz-De­wald must be pre­pared to em­brace both the sen­su­al and the spir­itu­al at the same time - must enter an aes­thet­ic-philo­soph­ic­al sphere, Phenom­ena, a deep­er look, bey­ond pro­fane ob­ject know­ledge.

It is pre­cisely the di­versity of this artist­ic work, ran­ging from clas­sic­al im­agery to in­nov­at­ive in­stall­a­tion con­cepts to our own cul­tur­al pro­jects, which dir­ects our at­ten­tion to the artist­ic idea be­hind it, to the un­der­ly­ing ideas or prin­ciples as well as to the cre­at­ive in­ten­tion of the artist, which seems ab­stract enough In all these dif­fer­ent forms and tech­niques.

Asian in­flu­ences are un­mis­tak­able: The artist travels to in­ter­cul­tur­al pro­jects sev­er­al times in Japan and China (most re­cently in Hefei), deals with Buddhism and Tao­ism and learns the Chinese lan­guage. In­di­an ink, tra­di­tion­ally used for draw­ing and cal­li­graphy, is the me­di­um that com­bines visu­al and verbal - a thought that is par­tic­u­larly anchored in the ori­gins of Asian cul­ture.

Wheth­er Chinese, French or Itali­an, Manz-De­wald is an im­port­ant means of ex­pres­sion and ex­change, for own thoughts and in­ter­na­tion­al artists' con­tacts. Lit­er­at­ure in­spires her, and series like les traces are con­cretely presen­ted with text pas­sages.

The phar­macist uses chem­ic­al pro­cesses, al­lows photo de­velopers to work in image de­vel­op­ment and fixes the aes­thet­ic event. A du­al­ism of cre­at­ing and per­mit­ting a har­mo­ni­ous bal­ance between the poles of the spon­tan­eous, the un­con­scious, the ac­ci­dent­al, the in­ten­tion­al, the con­scious, or the con­cep­tu­al.

Devel­op­ment and dia­lectic are the es­sence of this art; Image, lan­guage, sound, water, light are the media, char­ac­ter­ized by in­tu­ition and in­tel­lect, med­it­at­ive con­cen­tra­tion and cul­tur­al com­mu­nic­a­tion, as an ex­pres­sion of the inner being and in­tern­al­iz­a­tion of the ex­ter­i­or.

Ex­cerpt from Dr. Mar­ina Lin­ares, art his­tor­i­an (Co­logne, April 2010)