CORNELIA THOMSEN

Born in East Germany during a period when Realism was the sole aesthetic, Thomsen discovered Abstraction following the unification of East and West Germany. While the artist began her career as a figurative painter, she subsequently pursued abstract modes of expression and developed her representative Stripes series, transforming natural scenes into abstracted, minimalist works.

Although best recognised for her abstract works, Thomsen’s recent portrait series marks the artist’s return to figuration. In contrast to her early works, this series melds figuration with the ‘light’ present within Thomsen’s abstract paintings and offers a novel aesthetic. Whilst the series draws inspiration from nature and the self, a common thread throughout Thomsen’s production remains in the way she confronts notions of femininity, whilst maintaining an innate sense of strength and vulnerability.

In addition to her portraits, Unfolding Ratio will present Thomsen’s minimalist black-and-white GR series, her watercolour Garden series, oil on copper works, as well as her NFT works, offering a diverse display of Thomsen’s multifaceted oeuvre.

Unfolding Ratio

‘Each of my series, from the abstract ‘Stripes’ paintings to the ‘Garden’ watercolours and my recent portraits, meditates on a distinct moment in a complex professional, psychological, and political journey.

Composed of vertical lines that vary in colour and width, the ‘Stripes’ paintings are executed on canvases that seem hard-edged at a distance yet on closer viewing reveal subtle tonal gradations.

My ‘Garden’ paintings traverse the tonal range of a single colour, or at most two different basic colours, applied in arrays of soft brushstrokes with no outlines that fill the entire pictorial space. The watercolour forms coalesce, disperse, and merge again, expressive of an inward struggle for meaning and resolution.

My most recent subject is Anna, a young woman. Anna’s gaze, typically directed at the viewer, identifies her as a person of the present day, self-assertive and defying our judgment. Growing up acutely aware of the consequences of my actions and words, my intense, hypnotic Anna portraits epitomise the present-day ethos of optimistic independence tempered by watchful resilience.’

– Cornelia Thomsen

√K Contemporary, Tokyo.