Katja Oxman Gift: Muskegon Museum of Art

Robert D. and C. Corcoran Tuttle Gallery

Katja Oxman uses still life imagery to reveal personal histories and dreamlike, poetry inspired environments. Birds, potted plants, flowers, fruits, and personal artifacts are quietly locked into precisely staged and shallowly layered environments. The flat pictorial spaces of postcards and the intricate designs of rugs and tapestries exaggerate the sense of flatness, while simultaneously serving as windows and doorways into other spaces.

Oxman achieves her rich, dense color through a three to four plate etching process. The colors merge when printed, creating secondary and tertiary hues, and emphasizing the sense of layering and visual density.

This selection of artworks, with the exception of a print acquired in 2008 by the West Shore Graphic Arts Society for the museum, are all recent gifts through an anonymous donor and the artist. In accepting this gift, the Muskegon Museum of Art is able to enhance its print holdings, bringing a contemporary voice to a collection that features the work of seminal printmakers such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pablo Picasso.

Katja Oxman was born in Munich, Germany in 1942. Her family eventually fled Germany and settled in the U.S. in 1952. Oxman’s first art studies were at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then later at the Die Akademie der bildenden Kunst in Munich and the Royal College in London. She has taught at Bryn Mawr College, the Skowhegan School, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, The American University in Washington, D.C., and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from the National Academy of Design on multiple occasions. Her prints are held in the permanent collection of major U.S. museums, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.