Dorothea Stiegemann: Insiders

About

CASSIUS&Co. is delighted to present the exhibition Dorothea Stiegemann: Insiders, opening at 63 Kinnerton Street, London, on 17th September 2022 and running until 28th November 2022. An illustrated catalogue with text by curator Beth Greenacre will be published alongside the exhibition.

This is an exhibition of paintings based on ultrasound scans of the inside of the female body. The scans might have been taken during pregnancy or illness, but that is not for the viewer to know. Instead they are images of an inner world in the most bodily sense of that term, painted with a delicacy that makes the forms diaphanous and closer to the open structure of dreams. They have the unfathomable innerness of Piranesi’s prison etchings, but they are not fictitious; they are deeply personal and real.

These are paintings that are based on sound rather than sight, and in their darknesses can be seen cavernous halls, swirling oceans, stained-glass windows, spines, bridges and tiny, beating hearts. Their final unknowability, their secrecy, leaves them open to a vastness of readings, and in the end they are paintings about who, exactly, gets to know the meaning of images.

Dorothea Stiegemann was born in 1983 in Gießen, Germany. She graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she studied under Jörg Immendorff and as a Master's student of Peter Doig. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at galleries across Germany as well as in London, Florence and Nagoya, including the 2021 exhibition at CASSIUS&Co., Dorothea Stiegemann: Eden. She lives and works in Berlin.