Charlotte Schleiffert’s large paintings and drawings have a strong visual impact. The expressive works are layered and daubed with a broad combination of media: pastels, acrylics, oil, egg tempera, foil, tissue… Larger than life-sized and brightly coloured, they often depict women: as warriors, pin-ups, cover girls or pop idols. These women present themselves provocatively to the onlooker. At times, they have a hybrid form, like when the pin‐up girl or extravagantly dressed woman is adorned with a bird’s head or dinosaur’s scull. Schleiffert addresses social and political themes such as unequal relations of power or abuse relentlessly. Raw and sensual at the same time, her works show fierce, colourful confrontations between man and woman, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, weak and strong.
“You must keep on searching”, Charlotte Schleiffert says, “to ensure that the fire keeps burning”. Her travelling and long-term residencies in faraway places like China, Mexico, the USA, Thailand, Tibet or Cuba have often been fuel for Schleiffert’s work.