This is the first monograph about the work of the artist Charlotte Schleiffert (b. Tilburg, 1967). Since winning the first prize in the Prix de Rome for painting in 1999, her work has been shown at various important group exhibitions at home and abroad. The first solo presentation of her work is being held at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen here in the Netherlands in February 2004. Charlotte Schleiffert is inspired by the harshness of life, as captured in photography but also as she observes it in the vicinity of her studio. Her work is provocative without being vulgar.
Schleiffert exuberantly places humankind - at the mercy of the arbitrariness of human urges - in the spotlight. The erotic undertone never degenerates into pornography. Her paintings are about the different sexes and about emotional experiences - love, power and violence - which everyone is subject to, rather than about sex. Schleiffert portrays the whole spectrum of humanity and, to one's heart's content, this can be experienced as stimulating or as cause for discomfort.
Hallmarks of Schleiffert's drawings and paintings are their massive dimensions and the combination of different techniques, painterly and sculptural. Her multicoloured figures, glorified with collages of silver paper and gleaming foil, seem to nearly break loose from the background. Schleiffert's cultivated style, violent and apparently raw, has an immediate and sensual effect, but is also subservient to the themes that she explores: power, lust, temptation and perdition.
This generously illustrated publication includes two essays. Wilma Sütö, keeper of the Rotterdam City Collection, explores the background to Charlotte Schleiffert's work, while an essay by Xandra Schutte, editor-in-chief of the Dutch news weekly Vrij Nederland and author of Maskerade, is linked to themes in Charlotte Schleiffert's paintings and drawings.
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