Birgitt Bolsmann*
Paintings and drawings 1973–1990

Birgitt Bolsmann (1944-2000) already tried her hand at a reality orientated artistic expression while studying in Hamburg with Hans Thiemann and Kurt Kranz which she systematically applied in realistic pencil drawings and oil paintings from 1973 on – thus being part of the movement emerging in the early 1960s and which marks a turning away from abstraction and art informel.

She draws her subjects initially from fashion photography and striking advertising, from 1980 on replacing the “artificially beautiful women” by mannequins, examining them in terms of the image of women that they propagate. Titles such as The Ideal of the Patriarch (1977), Medusa laughing (1983), or In Leda’s Boudoir (1986) reflect the artist’s critical view of the male-dominated pictorial subjects in art history and the transmitted ancient myths. In a multi-layered painting process making use of an old-masterly technique (egg tempera and resin oil paint on canvas) she fixes her subjects with great clarity using a cool colour scheme. Placed in the foreground of the picture, the motifs, which are fixed in every detail, display a concentrated presence that often contrasts with the neutral flatness of the light background. Bolsmann not only exposes the “beautiful glow” of the market-driven idealized female body, but furthermore, through the pressing immediacy, she formally creates a field of tension between realistic plasticity and two-dimensional abstraction – thus withdrawing her works from bare representationalism.