Cornelia Baltes

Cornelia Baltes is a German artist known for her paintings and installations that stand on the edge of abstraction and figuration. Corporeal elements such as hands and feet, part of a face, often captured in motion, are teased out of bold colour fields and gestural forms that combine to hint at a narrative in pictorial space. In crystallising ‘moments’ that seem charged with intensity and dynamism, Cornelia Baltes invites us into a coherent world where spontaneity and playfulness are balanced with unexpected detail: both meticulous and specific, yet light and effortless. This all signals a generosity to the viewer which also extends to the imagery in the work, which is open enough to invite us to overlay our own subjective experiences, morphing for each of us into a different narrative, into something personal and almost intimate while at the same time being open and universal in its ability to do so.

Cornelia Baltes graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art; London in 2011. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany; Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany; Chapter Arts Center, Cardiff, UK; Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales, UK; Northern Gallery for Contemporary Arts, Sunderland, UK; ICA London, UK; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Germany, among many others.

Her work is included in the Government Art Collection, UK; Arts Council Collection, London, UK; V+A Collection, London, UK; UCL Collection, London, UK; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, China.