Christine Schlegel

Lärmende Stille (Noisy Silence)

 

30/11/24—16/02/25

 

The solo exhibition Lärmende Stille (Noisy Silence) shows almost 150 works by the artist Christine Schlegel (born 1950 in Crossen / GDR), who lives and works in Dresden. Created between the late 1970s and the present day, the main focus of the presentation is on the interfaces between painting, collage, photo collage and overpainting as well as filmic and performative practices. At the latest during her painting studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (HfBK), it became apparent that Christine Schlegel’s idea of art (and life) could not be reconciled with strict regulations of any kind. While her discomfort was initially sparked by the normative system of the GDR, she remained a critical free spirit even after she left for the Federal Republic of Germany and the Netherlands in 1986, whose striving for unconditional autonomy characterizes her entire oeuvre.

 

From the very beginning, Christine Schlegel developed her image/world designs, which are based on profound discussions of art-historical images of mythological narratives and realities. In her works, these reflections are intertwined with an often critical, but also often humorous view of sociopolitical realities and everyday living conditions. In an almost cinematographic manner, the artist allows various narratives and reference systems to flow together in all forms of expression in her works and creates poetic-fantastic image cosmoses that are usually based on collage principles. Regardless of the form of expression, the image concepts of Schlegel’s paintings, as well as the (photo) collages and the film work, are characterized by constant, precise overlays of motifs, the interweaving and overlapping of image fragments that come from different sources and represent different realities, imaginations and their reflections.

 

The exhibition is structured using a loose chapter structure. Almost prologically, the presentation in Maschinenhaus 1 presents Christine Schlegel’s understanding of images through three films. The basic themes and formal vocabulary are set in two performative films from the early 1980s and a collage film from the 1990s: the struggle of the human subject for freedom and micro-world designs between reality and imagination through artistic overwriting and appropriation of standardized representations of reality.

 

In Maschinenhaus 2, works are juxtaposed that evoke sociopolitical conditions on various levels, especially in the last decade of the GDR. While the photo collages from the early 1980s reflect the view of the artist’s private living environment, but also charge them with fictional narratives, Schlegel’s shrink-wrapped, edited Stasi documents testify to an artistic act of self-empowerment and the reappropriation of her own history. The large-format paintings, in turn, create images of humanity and people that are linked to archaic myths and the will to fantasy as well as the handling of (political) history.

 

The (artistic) storytelling as an (aesthetic) form of assembling different pieces creates the connection between the various series of works presented in the Maschinenhaus 3. The references to art history are also evident here. It is not just formal-aesthetic borrowings and references that testify to this engagement. Rather, Christine Schlegel sometimes lets important art-historical images and personalities „wander“ through her own pictures, thereby creating connections between individual works and series. Over the decades, recurring, sometimes slightly modified figures have appeared in pictures and stroll through the artist’s oeuvre as evolving narrative elements.