Cordula Güdemann belongs to the group of figurative artists who, through their expressive style, cross over into abstraction without transition or reservation. In the most recent phase of her work, she reacts to the powerlessness in the face of war and persecution on the edges of Europe: aware that one can hardly capture the unspeakable in a pictorial way, she finds a non-objective pictorial language in small and medium-format gouaches as well as in larger paintings. It is characterized by a rebellious use of color, but is not exhausted in the furor of the commission, but also reveals through the formally accentuating brushstroke and the subtle palette a painting culture that allows space for the sublime as well as for the horror, which breaks through in an only perceptible thingness. In the painting "Free Play" of 2019, massive reds as well as accentuated blues and greens pile up to form a scenic image that has no real top or bottom and no foreground or background. One rather has the impression that the work could also be hung upside down - as if the world had lost its coordinates. Cordula Güdemann's painting captivates with strong colors, bright accents, pieced-together splinters and passages. Sometimes large complexes of forms set the tone, sometimes a jungle-like impenetrability prevails. Frequently, her gestural imagery responds to societal threats, betraying the deep sympathy of an artist who is far from an abstract indifference. About her painting Güdemann writes: "Painterly problems, questions of construction, geometric or chaotic forms and surfaces have occupied me since I have been painting, just as they have occupied painters and draftsmen for almost 600 years. In recent years, however, themes from social and political contexts have become increasingly important to me. That is, I do not exclude topics that generally concern the 'condition humaine'. I deal with these things, change the order in which they come to me, and create new contexts of meaning."