The painter, filmmaker, photographer, performance artist and author Cornelia Schleime travels widely - she finds her visual language not only in painting, but also in music, poetry and film. Her artistic roots in the GDR and the exhibition ban imposed on her in 1981, spying by colleagues, and finally her departure from East Germany - as a result of which she largely lost her early work - left their mark on the artist: her independent and self-confident development of her work made her one of the best-known painters of her generation. In her portrait painting, in which one encounters nuns, popes, figures from fairy tales and legends, the focus is on the changeable and wonderful of the human being: the vulnerable, the hidden, the mysterious is the theme - in terms of content, a melancholy mood dominates, formally the artist explores the boundaries of subject, color field and abstraction. The impasto applied varnish colors (shellac, aphalt varnish) in the painting give a fascinating shine, but also create an existential distance to the viewer. The charm of the figures, which one can hardly escape, lies in the enormous presence and forcefulness of their physiognomy.