Growing up in a dictatorship of the "set we" (Uwe Kolbe), she had learnt in time to escape the constraints and impositions of prescribed happiness. "The community domesticates the extremes." It would have "smoothed out my fractures. I didn't want to change anything here except myself. I was fed up with the way people deceived themselves. I didn't want to grow old like that." Early on, she dreamed of travelling to Morocco like August Macke, "to meet myself in the distance, to immerse myself in the opium of unbridled sunshine." She always wanted to be a traveller and visit the world's great museums, these powerhouses of concentrated energy, to encounter the Giottos, Masaccios, van Eycks, Vermeers, Manets and Turners, "perhaps even just to come face to face with a small watercolour by Wilhelm Blake."
Instead, she first went on a virtual journey through the catalogues and artists' books of the Saxon State Library. There she discovered Arnulf Rainer, Cy Twombly and Francis Bacon. Twombly in particular opened up new visual spaces for her. Her professor at the Dresden Academy of Art knew none of these artists. After training as a hairdresser, studying make-up art and working as a groom at the thoroughbred racecourse in Dresden, she graduated in painting and graphic art from the Academy of Art on the Brühische Terrasse in 1980.
1) Quoted from a letter dated 30 May 1985
2) Unpublished text dated 26 March 2002.
Among her most beautiful works are the diaries collaged from texts, drawings, watercolours, postcards and photos about trips to Kenya, Indonesia, Brazil and Hawaii
Michael Freitag, Berlin, spoke at the opening of the exhibition on Friday 30 April 2004 at 8 pm.
The artist was present.
Catalogue
A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition.