Cornelia Schleime

(German, born 1953)

Cornelia Schleime is a German painter, performer, filmmaker, and author known for her paintings of women in dream-like spaces. Schleime cites Käthe Kollwitz, Francis Bacon, and Paula Modersohn-Becker as inspirations. Though her early work is often compared to 1970s feminist avant-garde artists like Annegret Soltau and Hannah Wilke, the artist has said her art “was more about vulnerability, about being at someone’s mercy, about Christ with the crown of thorns. I am closer to Arnulf Rainer than the feminists. He speaks of the negation of all extravagance. Everything that is excessive is negated. He tried to reduce everything and overpainted his works until only a bleating mouth peeped out.” Born on July 4, 1953 in East Berlin, Germany, she studied to be a hairdresser, makeup artist, and nurse before studying graphic design and painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. While at university, Schleime belonged to an underground movement against art censorship imposed by the German Democratic Republic. Her performance art and installation, Raum des Dichters (Room of the Poet) (1979), in the collaborative art show, “Türenausstellung,” contributed to the prohibition of her exhibitions in East Germany in 1981. The artist graduated in 1983, and in 1984, amid anxiety that she was being spied on, moved to West Berlin. Here, Schleime began painting on top of art reproductions and postcards, questioning truth and uniqueness in art, which she continued to explore in the 1990s in New York, where she took part in MoMA PS1’s National and International Studio Program Exhibition. In 2016, the artist received the Hannah Höch Prize from the State of Berlin. Schleime’s works are in the collections of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Kunstmuseum Walter in Augsburg, and the Märkisches Museum in Berlin, among others. The artist lives and works in Berlin, Germany.