| When looking at painting from Germany, it is wise not only to look through the Leipzig lens, but also to recognize the rich artistic geography of Germany as a whole. Germany has a strong, polycentric network of small arts academies with the most important artists teaching new talent. Berlin has recently been coming up as one of the hotspots attracting young talent and international artists alike, but certainly the academies in Cologne, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Munich still play a vital role in Germany’s art scene. “German Painting” aims at presenting, for the first time in London, three of the most eminent female painters currently working in Germany. |  |
German Painting – Manuel Ludorff
When looking at painting from Germany, it is wise not only to look through the Leipzig lens, but also to recognize the rich artistic geography of Germany as a whole. Germany has a strong, polycentric network of small arts academies with the most important artists teaching new talent. Berlin has recently been coming up as one of the hotspots attracting young talent and international artists alike, but certainly the academies in Cologne, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Munich still play a vital role in Germany’s art scene. “German Painting” aims at presenting, for the first time in London, three of the most eminent female painters currently working in Germany.
Karin Kneffel lives and works in Düsseldorf where she was a master student and assistant of Gerhard Richter’s at the renowned Kunstakademie in the 80s. In her paintings, Kneffel explores the relationship between image, perception and reality. Details of photographs are juxtaposed in a flawless and seductively beautiful, realist manner. But, her paintings are not about demonstrating her impressive technical ability, and neither are they about reproducing real life situations. The unusual perspectives, the often monumental enlargements as well as the slightly alienated setting of specific objects and details create a sublime and irrational atmosphere that challenges the viewer’s perception and often leave him puzzling over what is real and what is not. The contradiction between her self-explanatory, realist style and the uncertainty caused by de-familiarizing the perception of the subjects shown, represents the essence of Karin’s art.
Cornelia Schleime was born in East Berlin in 1953. She grew up experiencing the communist dictatorship of the GDR at its worst. Having trained as a hairdresser and makeup artist, she briefly worked as a stable hand and soon thereafter enrolled in painting and printmaking at the Hochschule fuer Bildende Kuenste in Dresden. As she was also a member of the relatively small Eastern German punk scene, she soon found herself closely watched at by the Stasi, the much feared intelligence organization of the GDR. Shortly after leaving the academy in Dresden, she faced an exhibition ban, which essentially led to her decision to immigrate to West Germany. After several appeals and years without exhibiting her work, she was finally allowed to immigrate in 1984. This came at the cost of having to leave her former work behind, which has since been lost. In the West, her life as an artist flourished. She was not only granted a stipend to stay at PS1 for a year in 1989, but important exhibitions and prizes also followed. In her paintings, Schleime condenses the archetypal lifelines of 20th century people showing their dark sides, the abysses of their souls, the possibility of failure, the discrepancies of individual and social or collective expectations and aspirations. What we see in her recent paintings of hunting scenes may be an atmospheric, lively rendering of men, women, horses and dogs. But, ever since Maximilian the Great’s reform of the hunt in continental Europe, which took away the right of the “low hunt”—rabbits, hares, ducks—from the common man, causing a severe lack of animal protein and social strife for the simple man, any representation of the hunt is to be understood as a possible means of social criticism. Her hunting paintings could therefore be seen as highly aesthetic, richly symbolic representations of the economic and social state of post¬modern society, but they should not be confounded with social propaganda. As in all great art, art itself is one of the main subjects in her work. By using various techniques such as acrylic, asphalt lacquer, shellac and varnish, Cornelia Schleime achieves spectacular surfaces and successfully hunts for great paintings and great art.
The Korean painter SEO left Seoul in 2001 to join the class of Georg Baselitz at the Hochschule der Kuenste in Berlin. She left as a master student of his in 2004. Within the exhibition SEO represents the quickly growing community of international artists living and working in Germany, mainly in Berlin. Her work is the result of exciting research conducted on the pictorial traditions and techniques found not only in Chinese and Korean, but foremost in German art history. SEO tears up thick rice paper and sticks it onto the canvas. She then thinly paints the paper with watercolours allowing the white canvas to shine through. By doing so, her work reaches an intensity in color, quickly reminding us of the glowing watercolors of the German expressionist Emil Nolde, whom she admires strongly. Her romantic motifs of idealized rural scenes, as well as the monumental compositions, pay tribute both to traditional Asian landscape painting, in which a landscape is seen more as a phenomenon of contemplation rather than one of perception, as well as to the romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich. Although her work is deeply rooted in the work of Friedrich and Nolde, amongst others, SEO’s paintings are characterized by their individual and manifold ways of expression. The strong colors of the water, the sun and the mountains unfold a sensual panorama of naturalness, which the artist borrows from the depths of her memories and closely binds it with the Western notion of structural unity with nature. SEO portrays, in a very self-confident manner, how an artist’s work can engage in an exciting dialogue between the history of art and their own pictorial subjects.
Manuel Ludorff
Marlborough Fine Art
Current Exhibition:
German Painting: Paintings and works on paper by Karin Kneffel, Cornelia Schleime & SEO
18 July – 11 August 2007
6, Albemarle Street
London W1S 4BY
Tel: 020 7629 5161
Fax: 020 7629 6338
www.marlboroughfineart.com
