Opening – 27 APR 2024, 6-9 pm

Cornelia Schleime, who turned 70 in 2023, is the Grande Dame of German painting. She is the great observer and storyteller par excellence, who light-footedly merges reality and fantasy into visually powerful compositions, pursuing German Romantic traditions in a way that is as clever as it is aesthetically pleasing. Since the 1990s, she has predominantly portrayed compelling, imaginary characters in her paintings, whose presence and expressiveness easily fill pictorial spaces of her mostly large works. The figures are always self-confident and unbending and thus speak out against heteronomy, egalitarianism and oppression.

Cornelia Schleime was born in East part of Berlin in 1953, where she trained as a hairdresser and make-up artist before she took up her studies in painting in Dresden. Her interest in revealing the different “faces” of people is apparent from an early stage and were to become a common thread in Schleime’s work. The intense spying and harassment she endured from the GDR regime, before she was finally allowed to leave for the West in 1984, sharpened her sensitivity towards the individual in the field of tension of its social and political conditions. The portraits at the center of this exhibition, all created during the last 10 years, present themselves as lessons learned from these experiences. Ultimately, each of Schleime’s works revolves around the uniqueness, dignity and sovereignty of the individual. The artist can now look back on an oeuvre that is not only of art-historical but also of political significance.