About my Work

My work is usually circling around a theme, which might transform into another theme after a while. Maybe an animistic view forms the basis of all my works, close to the magic and poetic world of theatre and fairytale. In the theatrical setting, the boundaries between the Inner and the Outer, between Life and Lifelessness are blurred. In this playful mode, metamorphoses are possible, and in the lightness of "as-if" there is space for the tragic and the comical, as well as for the sublime and the trivial.

In that sense the pictorial space is an atmospheric space. The porosity of the monochrome light/dark surface, the dissolution into fine lines, create an immaterial, floating atmosphere without clear boundaries. The scenes, at first sight lovely, with a closer look often reveal irritating moments. Their ambivalence somehow reminds of "fly-papers": the temptations of their sweet and sticky surface can be a trap.

The starting point and pictorial base of my work can be own photographs, historical images, drawings from self-made models or "objets trouvés". A source of inspiration can also be texts, elements from dreams, memories and body feelings, followed by a process of esthetical deepening and clarification.

Puppet Show is about the fairytale-like reanimation of usually lifeless puppet bodies, an old theme of puppet theatre. In the drawings, the puppet heads come so close to the paper surface that their breath seems to condense on it like dust.

The "Moth Dresses" and pictorial objects of Körper – Hülle – Kleid ("Body – Shell – Dress") are inspired by Robert Musil’s text "tangle foot" – a fly-paper and parable of war and death. This war goes under the skin, under the shell – under the body dress. The patterns on the Vogue child dress remind of strategic drawings on battle plans. The paper dress made from parchment is a scene of death itself and, as a moth cloth, a symbol of resurrection as well.

In Lichtungen ("Clearings") I also focus on those magic places of transition, where borderlines become permeable and contours blur and dissolve. In reality, these are areas where nature transcends into culture. In the esthetical field of pictures it can be a sphere of unsharpness, vagueness and indefinability. "Unsharpness is the visual transition medium to something new, …, from alertness to daydreaming, from brightness to the sealed-off, from silence to murmuring, but also from certainty to feeling and guessing. (Bernd Hüppauf: "Eine neue Unschärfe", 2011)

In Das andere Album ("The Other Album") I visually examine photographs from my private family album among other things. Cautious questioning and an awry look lead to an esthetical alienation: by integrating strange personage, enlarging or modifying unremarkable details, rebuilding pictorial elements etc., I playfully reanimate them in my drawings.

Gudrun Schaefer, January 2014