Cornelia Schleime

Cornelia Schleime (born July 4, 1953, in Berlin, Germany) is a German painter, performer, filmmaker and author.

Born in East Berlin under the GDR, she studied painting and graphic arts at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before becoming a member of the underground art scene.

Schleime was born in 1953 in East Berlin.

She grew up under the dictatorship of a "gesetztes Wir" (predefined collective or "We") she had learned very early to retract from the coercions and imputations of a prescribed happiness.

A "Community tames extremes".

It would "have smoothened out my fractions. I did not want to change anything here, with the exception of myself. I was fed up with the way people betrayed themselves. I didn't want to grow old that way."

Rather early she dreamed of going to Morocco like August Macke, in order to "meet my self in the faraway lands, to dive into the opium of unfettered suns."

She always wanted to be a traveller and visit the great museums of the world, these power stations of concentrated energy, to meet the Giottos, Masaccios, van Eycks, Vermeers, Manets and Turners there, and "maybe only to stand only once in front of a small watercolour by William Blake."

Between 1970 and 1975 Schleime completed a hairdresser's apprenticeship and a studied as a camouflage and make-up artist.

She later worked as a stable-girl at the Dresden Thoroughbred Races and as a nursing assistant for a short time.

Schleime began her studies of painting and graphic arts at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1975.

Schleime began her exploration of performance art with works such as a "Raum des Dichters" (Room of the Poet) in the autumn of 1979 as part of this.

The group refused to exhibit conventional art as defined by the authorities in the GDR and developed a project of working on a topical issue relevant to their generation.

They agreed on a proposal by Michael Freudenberg to choose the theme of doors, an associative response to being in a country enclosed by a wall.

In the autumn of 1979, the Leonhardi Museum in Dresden (the former studio-house of the Dresden late Romantic Eduard Leonhardi ) hosted the group's collaborative work “Türenausstellung” (“Exhibition of Doors”).

Michael Freudenberg, Monika Hanske, Volker Henze, Ralf Kerbach, Helge Leiberg, Reinhard Sandner, Cornelia Schleime and Karla Woisnitza each created an installation, while Thomas Wetzel organised four outdoor actions relating to the theme.

The exhibition attracted attention from the general public, with A. R. Penck claiming that it represented “the beginning of victory over false consciousness (falsches Bewußtsein)!”.

The band lasted from 1979 to 1983.

Ralf Kerbach, inspired by the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers, was guitarist.

Schleime was the vocalist and was accompanied by Matthias Zeidler on bass and Wolfgang Grossmann on drums.

The band name resulted either from Ralf Kerbach's predilection for Paul Klee's homonymous picture, or from a performance of Luis Buñuel's film An Andalusian dog.

They performed in studios, In the drama school Ernst Busch and in the Erfurt "gallery in the hall".

In 1980 she received her diploma in painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Arts at the Brühlsche Terrasse.

A number of artists, including Schleime, were contributing to a strong feminist voice within East German underground art, working with a clear feminist idiom and feminist content, without realizing they were or actively participating in a larger international feminist debate.

Her participation in this exhibition, her broad definition of art and her unconventional works and shows resulted in an exhibition ban for her in 1981.

In a 1996 interview, Schleime reflects on her life in East Berlin's effect on her work "I believe in general, and here I refer to the time in the East, that the oppression or limitations which I experienced did not influence painting. The painting was or is not for me a processing machine for political or personal emergency. In any case, I suffered more from the provinciality of the GDR than from their politics, so our conversations in the East were so often centered around the "universal." No, I can handle nothing with my painting. My work should be purpose-free, only in this way can I open up new spaces. In the east I had one of the cops, who was standing at the Friedrichstrasse junction, with the umbrella - that was the way to get my frustration, not the brush!"

Both Schleime's parents were of catholic origin, her father is from the Rhineland and her mother from Gdansk (Danzig).

They moved to Berlin (East) after the war.

Her father, who had been married before, could not marry her mother in church, according to catholic rules.

So the grandparents only consented to the partnership under the condition that Schleime be raised strictly catholic.

Her experience with Catholicism is a consistent influence to her works.

She was awarded the Hannah Höch Lifetime Achievement Award from the State of Berlin in 2016.

In a 2016 interview Schleime confronted the comparison of her works to 1970s feminist avant-garde artists Annegret Soltau and Hannah Wilke: "Of course I had heard of these artists. But I wasn’t interested in feminism at all. When I went to the West, the feminists thought they had found a comrade-in-arms. But they were wrong. My actions aren’t directed against men. They’re directed against the fact that they stripped me of the freedom to show my art, and so I got naked and tied myself up. I didn’t do it for sexual reasons. I got naked because I was forced to be naked. The GDR took everything I had. I also did those things where I enveloped myself in barbed wire. It was more about vulnerability, about being at someone’s mercy, about Christ with the crown of thorns. I am closer to Arnulf Rainer than to 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."

In her undergraduate days, Schleime belonged to a group of young artists who formed a counter-movement to official GDR art policy.

The artists pursued new experimental paths and devised alternative presentation formats in studios and private homes.

In an interview in 2017 she explains that she planning an exhibition that was prevented.

"The exhibition manager told me that the culture ministry had imposed a ban on my work. I started working with the pseudonym CMP [Cornelia Monica Petra, Schleime’s full name] so that they wouldn’t know it was me... I was never an enemy of the state or anything like that, I just had a different visual concept. I was told, for instance, that a woman I’d painted, with her head hanging down in a melancholy, surreal expression, didn’t look as she should according to socialism."

Cornelia Schleime and Ralf Kerbach met at the Dresden University of Fine Arts and created the art-punk band Zwitschermaschine, or "Twittering".

After a failed art exhibition in the Radeburg Heimatmuseum, organized by Michael Rom, they decided to make music together.