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17/7/2007

German Painting

Marlborough Fine Art, London

Paintings and works on paper by Karin Kneffel, Cornelia Schleime and SEO

The Directors of Marlborough Fine Art are delighted to announce their forthcoming London debut exhibition of three of Germany’s most eminent female painters.

Karin Kneffel, born in Marl in 1957, lives and works in Dusseldorf, where she was a master student of Gerhard Richter’s at the Kunstakademie in the 1980’s. In her paintings Karin Kneffel explores the relationship between image, perception and reality. Details of photographs she has taken and collected over the years are juxtaposed in a flawless and seductively beautiful realist manner. But her paintings are not about demonstrating her impressive technical ability, neither about reproducing real life situations. The unusual perspectives, the often monumental enlargement as well as the slightly alienated setting of specific objects and details create a sublime and irrational atmosphere that challenge 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 defamiliarizing the perception of the subjects shown represents the concept of Karin Kneffel’s art. Her work has recently been celebrated in a large retrospective exhibition at the Sinclair Haus in Bad Homburg, the Moenchehaus Museum für Moderne Kunst in Goslar and the Ulmer Museum. Since 2000 Karin Kneffel has taught painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Bremen.

Cornelia Schleime, born in East Berlin in 1953, grew up experiencing the communist dictatorship of the former GDR at its worst. Having trained as a hairdresser and makeup artist she briefly worked as a stablehand and soon thereafter enrolled in painting and printmaking at the academy in Dresden. As she was a member of the liberal arts scene at that time, as well as the opposing 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 emigrate to West Germany. After several appeals and years without exhibiting her work, she was finally allowed to emigrate in 1984. This came at the cost of having to leave her former work behind, which has been lost ever since. In the West her life as an artist flourished. In 1989 she received a stipend to stay at the PS1 in New York for a year. Over the following years she increasingly received international attention through her series of expressive children’s portraits as well as through a series of paintings of Pope John Paul II. She was recently awarded with the Gabriele-Muenter-Award and the Fred-Thieler-Award for painting. What we see in Cornelia Schleime's most recent paintings of hunting scenes may be an atmospheric, lively rendering of men, women, horses and dogs. We may also understand them as highly aesthetic, richly symbolic representations of the economic and social state of post­modern society, albeit that we can never be sure of who is the hunter and who is the hunted. Her paintings have a lot to do with the reconstruction of possible biographies, 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, which 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 an exciting research conducted in 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 colour, which quickly reminds us of the glowing watercolours 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. Though being deeply rooted in the work of Friedrich and Nolde amongst others, SEO’s paintings are characterised by their individual and manifold ways of expression. The strong colours 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 to the Western notion of structural unity with nature. She 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.

Marlborough Fine Art
6 Albemarle Street - London

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