Cornelia Schleime

“In love and in art, I know exactly what I don’t want.”

Cornelia Schleime is considered the main representative of contemporary figurative painting and is one of the best-known German artists. Her hauntingly developed portraits, especially of women and children, but also of clowns and the Pope, are highly regarded.

“Many East German artists painted torn faces, showing their closeness to Expressionism. I, on the other hand, changed my faces because I enjoyed playing. I don’t want to let this fun be taken away from me and live it out in my art.”

As an artist, Cornelia Schleime wants to dissolve the boundaries between the outer and inner worlds. “The unpredictable, irrational, fragile, random and eruptive give me stability”. Schleime plays with prejudices and provokes by raising controversial questions. In interviews, she talks about her experiences with posing and staging herself.

The dualistic concepts of her works stem from a New Objectivity approach. The simultaneity of closeness and distance or topoi such as “interpersonal coldness” and “unlimited intercourse”. The playful use of quotations that was characteristic of New Objectivity between the two world wars still seems to be relevant in Schleime’s work, as does the constant reclamation of the figurative.