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Cornelia Renz
Contemporary Fairytales
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Written by Cornelia Renz
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Artist bio
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Artist bio
In my works I let the pre-pubescent girl, the cliched ‘girl-bride’, the eroticised nymphet undermine their cultural attributions and let them test an opposite, violent or threatening behaviour. Sometimes it takes the form of plagiarised gender, boys dress in girl's clothes, girls adopting the militaristic roles of men—a slapstick comedy, which tends towards the fetishist parameters of art brut and psychotic art, those chaotic and transgression-realms wherein dream projection, desire, and catharsis take root by necessity.
The idea of childhood as a place of innocence is a cultural interpretation born out of desire not reality; many children experience more cruelty, than adults are even able to imagine. These bitter experiences are part of fairy tales: Passed by word of mouth, fairy tales are short stories with themes taken of reality (poverty, disease, hunger, and war) but exalted by magical and mythic elements. The misery of the fairy tale hero (and it is always the youngest, weakest boy or girl) is turned by the help of fairies, helping animals and other mysteries into a happy end. But if focusing on what happens in the story before the magic happy end shows up, there is boundless suffering and barbarous cruelty.
My work is based on the power of fairy tales to blur the up-to-datedness of their inherent barbarism with the naive infantile innocence of their heroes—or at least the fantastical and grotesque remains of the fairy tales that have been left to us in an age without innocence.
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