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Cornelia Baltes is known for her paintings and installations that stand on the edge of abstraction and figuration, shifting in turn from one to the other. Corporeal elements such as hands and feet, part of a face, often captured in motion, are combined with bold lines creating shapes and more gestural forms that come together to give us a hint of a narrative without revealing it to us in full.

In capturing these moments that seem charged with an intensity and a dynamicism, Cornelia Baltes invites us in to a world where spontaneity and playfulness give way to subtle details. Her precise technique and the use of highly pigmented black paint adds depth and contrasts her intense colour palate which ebbs and flows, contributing to this inherent lightness to the work while at the same time creating the feeling that it was done in the spur of the moment.

This provoked sense of urgency and energy that the works instil in the viewer reveals an intentionality. Each of Baltes brushstrokes feels deliberate, determined in their action while at the same time remaining open in their interpretation, revealing more to us with each turn. Working with a lexicon of imagery that has the power to play with our memories, her work draws on our subjective experiences, morphing for each of us into a different narrative, into something personal and almost intimate while at the same time being open and universal in their ability to do so.

Cornelia Baltes (b. 1978, Germany) is an exciting young artist who graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2011. She has exhibited in group shows at Kunsthalle Nuremburg (Nuremburg), MOSTYN (Wales), Museum Folkwang (Essen), Museum Kunst Palast Dusseldorf (Dusseldorf) among many others. In 2015, she had a solo show at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (Sunderland).