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. Although the work allows us to feel it could have exploded into being, the thoughtful use of material tells us otherwise.

Dense pigment is applied in a tightly controlled palette as solid fields or fine gradations which reveal or conceal the raw canvas, while ‘spontaneous’ brushstrokes are placed with care in spare but vibrant compositions. Tellingly, her approach to installation is a natural extension of this, anticipating lines of sight to allow the audience to feel the satisfying snap of creating a perfect composition.

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.