Christine Schlegel Initially, Christine Schlegel (b. 1950) apprenticed as a window dresser and poster and sign writer and completed an evening program at Dresden’s Hochschule für Bildende Künste. There, in 1973, she began an academic course of studies in graphic art and painting. Before long, she turned away from the school’s rigid methods and stiff subject matter taught there, including the “regimented copying”1 of paintings. From the early 1980s on, Schlegel’s works testified to her interest in an experimental and processoriented approach that had no regard for boundaries between different media. She employed this ambiguity to find a pertinent form for her preferred subjects, which Schlegel, Folding Blind 1 and 2, 1984–85, painted corresponded with her inner world of emotions, questions of identity, and the abstract- Christine folding blinds, East Germany. Courtesy of the artist expressive gesture. In her understanding of painting as action, she found support in exchanges with like-minded artists such as Karla Woisnitza and Erika Stürmer-Alex. A nonconformist role model for Schlegel, Stürmer-Alex initiated communal actions that walked the line between painting and performance on her artist farmstead in the Brandenburg town of Lietzen. Being in touch with central figures of other independent movements was another decisive aspect in Christine Schlegel’s development. Dance, theatre, and music became especially important as her creativity branched out to explore all kinds of substrates and forms, as was the case in intuitively reworked postcards which comment in a subversive and witty manner on “real socialist” everyday life and, repeatedly, on prescribed female roles; in expressively painted folding window blinds; and, no less, in actions and Christine Schlegel, Maybe I Will Suddenly stagings. She not only documented some of her collaborative work Disappear, 1986, on poems of Inge Müller (1925–1966), artist book, screen print, with dance performer Fine Kwiatkowski using 8-mm film, but also East Germany. Courtesy of the artist developed it further with live projections. Androgynous, mysterious, and boisterous, the artistic persona of Kwiatkowski embodied the very atmosphere that is conveyed by the central figures in Schlegel’s painting: “This figure impressed me because I had previously made marionette paintings involving bald characters. […] Fine looked as if she had jumped out of my paintings.”2 Schlegel’s protagonists – whether Kwiatkowski or Penthesilea – are lone warriors testing the limits of gender, of their own Christine Schlegel, Duality – My Friend as an IM (informal secret service bodies, and of freedom, and their collaborator), 1981, oil on canvas, East Germany. Albertinum – Galerie Neue resistance takes both a combative Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and a melancholic form. SA Christine Schlegel, Various postcards, from 1973, postcards, painted and collaged, East Germany. Courtesy of the artist
Christine Schlegel, Penthesilea, 1984, oil on hardboard, East Germany. Albertinum – Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Christine Schlegel, The Hothouse, 1984, performance: Fine Kwiatkowski, digitized 8mm film, sound, 12:34 min, East Germany. Courtesy of the artist
Christine Schlegel, Fine, 1984, oil on canvas, East Germany. Albertinum – Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
1 Cornelia Schleime in a note from 1982, in Cornelia Schleime, In der Liebe und in der Kunst weiss ich genau, was ich nicht will (Bielefeld, 2010), 16. 2 In the course of departing from East Germany in 1984, Schleime had to leave the better part of her work behind. With the exception of pieces that remained in the private ownership of fellow artists and friends, all of this work is considered lost today.
29