Following her debut solo exhibition at Livourne 32 in 2022, we are pleased to present Cornelia Baltes’ second show at the gallery, opening from May 23rd to July 13th, 2024, in our main space at Livourne 35. For this new exhibition, the Berlin-based artist activates the space with large, vividly pigmented paintings built from sprayed gradients, bold gestures, and fine brushwork.
Cornelia Baltes is a sponge, her images absorb the incidental. Based on memories rather than direct observation, she develops her paintings from brush sketches that are themselves painted from the memory of observational sketching. Works on paper provide a loose foundation for later work.
In many of the paintings, minutiae are scrutinized. Everything is fragmented and zoomed in on. Details emerge, and glimpses of things are subjected to forensic analysis. First impressions can be misleading. While the paintings appear strifeless, their extended gestation and reworking are, in fact, concealed under smooth layers of paint, while she repeatedly reworks the image until every line is flawless. Cornelia Baltes playfully blurs the lines between figuration and abstraction in compositions that never quite settle into an unambiguous motif. We may recognize some shapes, birds, or fragmented human anatomy frequently appearing with incongruous juxtapositions: smooth calligraphic marks and the occasionally hastily drawn oil pastel scrawl.
While Cornelia Baltes acknowledges the critical role of the viewer in completing the work with their own readings and associations, her paintings also embody ‘characters’ or ‘personalities’. Her system of naming works, which started with short Scandinavian first names, morphed over time into abstract last names. They infuse a flexible framework to acknowledge the individuality of the works. Eventually, when installed in site-specific ways, the paintings turn into characters on a stage, resulting in a two-way flow and dialogue between the spectator and the actor.
