Cornelia Baltes is a German artist known for her paintings and installations that blend abstraction and figuration. Corporeal elements such as hands, feet, and facial features are suggested amid bold color fields and gestures. These biomorphic elements capture the experience of viewing a bodily form in flight, not fully registered by the eye. To construct her paintings, Baltes applies dense pigment in a tightly controlled palette to canvas, creating finely gradated color fields that at times mask the raw canvas, and at other times reveal it. Then, the artist applies brushstrokes in spare but vibrant compositions. Her approach to installation is a natural extension of her paintings, using the architecture of the room to create a larger scene of compositional coherence.
Cornelia Baltes (b.1978, Germany) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art; London in 2011. She has exhibited in solo and group shows at Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; Museum Wiesbaden; Chapter Arts Center, Cardiff; Mostyn, Llandudno (Wales); Northern Gallery for Contemporary Arts, Sunderland (UK), ICA London, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Kunsthalle Nuremberg; Museum Folkwang (Essen), Museum Kunst Palast Dusseldorf among many others.