Each of Thomsen’s series on display, from the abstract Stripes and Structures compositions, to the recent Anna portraits, meditate on a distinct moment in a complex professional, psychological, and political journey.
Composed of vertical lines that vary in color and width, the Stripes paintings are executed freehand on canvases that seem hard-edged at a distance, yet upon closer viewing reveal subtle tonal gradations. Their warmth evokes nostalgic memories of outdoor scenes, reflecting a sensitivity toward nature inspired by the blue mountains of Thomsen’s childhood and the ocean waters of her adult life -- but her upbringing behind the closed borders of a totalitarian police state also finds expression here. Thomsen applies lines to her Stripes canvases horizontally, in keeping with their remote origins in landscape, but once completed they’re displayed vertically, eliminating any hint of literal representation. The finished works can thus seem to confront the viewer with symbolic walls or prison bars, expressing a tension between calm and repression that, despite superficial similarities, challenges the cool optimism of earlier American linear abstraction.
Thomsen’s most recent subject is Anna, a young woman painted in lustrous oils on copper and canvas. Vivid highlights and bravura strokes recall the classical society portraiture. But Anna’s gaze—typically directed haughtily at the viewer—identifies her as a person of the present day, self-assertive and defying our judgment. Painted by an artist who grew up acutely aware of the consequences of her actions and words, the intense, hypnotic Anna portraits epitomize our present-day ethos of optimistic independence tempered by watchful resilience.
The exhibition was presented by the German Consulate General and organized in collaboration with the Deutsches Haus at NYU.
Cornelia Thomsen was born 1970 in Rudolstadt in former East Germany. Recognized for her artistic skills from an early age, she was selected to be a student at the prestigious school of the Meissen Porcelain Factory. When the wall between East and West was razed in 1989, Thomsen weathered the time of ideological and economic collapse through personal reinvention. She enjoyed the freedom of travel for the first time, and her world was liberated by the discovery of abstract art, which was completely suppressed in East Germany as a capitalist construct. Thomsen enrolled and received BA and MFA degrees in the University of Art and Design in Offenbach, Germany, where her thesis marked the beginning of her investigation of abstract Stripes and led to her Role Models series, a realistic and robust examination of the East German political leaders. In 2006 she moved with her husband and three children from the Frankfurt area to New York.
An artist by profession, she works with the media oil, watercolor, and ink and is primarily known for her abstract Stripes series. She recognizes that being born into and living within the confines of East German socialism for her first twenty years has had a huge influence on everything she does. “How I think, what I want, what I need - you can relate it to everything I do,” she says.
Thomsen has had solo and group exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, and Duesseldorf, Germany, and is an active public speaker focusing on the recent history of Germany and the role of women in society. Her work is in numerous public collections, including that of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Friedrich Fröbel Museum, Bad Blankenburg, Germany. The artist currently lives and works in Manhattan with her family.
Venetia Kapernekas is an independent art consultant and curator of cultural projects, dedicated to discovering and guiding the development of creative growth in the art world. She has her BA in Political Science with a minor in Social Studies from University of California at Berkeley and her MFA in filmmaking and visual studies from San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California.