Cornelia Schleime

Cornelia Schleime: I paint, therefore I am

Cornelia Schleime is an artist who refused to be co-opted, either in the former GDR or later on the Western art scene. Her art evolved in tandem with the different stages of her life. She was never content with what she had just achieved. At no point did she commit herself to a single style once she had found it. Her paintings are always a living part of herself. They do not depict a world, for ‘the world, the real, is not an object. It is a process’ (John Cage). She often finds it difficult to part with paintings she has just completed for a long time. For her, they are not objects, but subjects that change with the light throughout the day, whose thin layer of paint can tear if one bumps into them. ‘It is her life that makes her vulnerable, and so is mine.’ (1.

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2) Unpublished text dated 26 March 2002.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.