Christa Magdalena Wittmann, PhD, born 1953 in Judenburg, grew up in Styria as well as in Tyrol, Austria and finished high school at a music and humanistic high school in Innsbruck. In the 1970s, she studied stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under the supervision of Lois Egg and painting combined with art history under the supervision of Josef Mikl. Her subsequent works were also influenced by Prof. Anton Lehmden and Prof. Rudolf Hausner, and consequently during this time, she focused on fantastic-surreal works.
Subsequently, she moved to Salzburg, however, maintained her Viennese contacts to artists. In Salzburg, she completed a degree in education. Due to her art background, she investigated and analyzed the archetypical, unrealistic and fantastic parts in children’s drawings in her diploma thesis "The nature of the mystery in children's drawings". The art she created at that time, was different in its visual expression to her current work in terms of themes, color and tension. On a art historian level, at that time she was focused on the study of paintings of the Renaissance.
In the late 1990s, Christa Magdalena decided to expand her knowledge in the field of art science and philosophy. The main focus of her art science studies were still lifes of the classical modern period from the perspective of the so called Gestalt psychology. This focus first appeared in her master's thesis on early still lifes by Henri Matisse. Her studies in art history and archeology was completed with the highest distinction with a dissertation titled "Pablo Picasso, Still Lifes (1895-1925),"Nature mortes dans l'art vivant". The intensive personal focus on the psychology in art and the laws of human perception which she investigated through the Gestalt psychology shape her present work.