Charlotte Schleifferts highly-expressive coloured drawings and paintings reflect socially relevant topics such as power, oppression, poverty, displacement or prostitution. The artist, who lives in Holland and China, finds her motifs in newspaper reports and magazines from the countries in which she dwells. Characteristic colours, moods, patterns or typical materials of the place where she is staying also run into her works: she aims to ‘hold onto’ relevant themes with her drawings, before they can disappear in the daily media current of the global age.
In Berlin, she has produced a series of small-format drawings based on current press reports e.g. on the situation in Darfur, discussion of youth violence, or the Palestinian exodus from Gaza. Schleiffert often relates the drawings to large-format portraits of women from glamorous magazines, which she monumentalises into provocative-expressive pin-ups with seemingly aggressive heroines and overpowering idols. The spatial installation of the drawings and collages heightens the images’ fascination and makes it difficult to evade their impact.