Annegret Soltau facts for kids

Annegret Soltau (born January 16, 1946) is a German artist from Lüneburg. She is known for her unique style of art, which often uses photographs of faces and bodies, including her own.

Soltau became a well-known artist in the 1970s and 1980s. Her most famous works are photomontages, which are pictures made by combining different photos. She often sewed over these images with black thread, creating powerful and thought-provoking art.

Early Life and Education

From 1967 to 1972, Annegret Soltau studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany. Her teachers included famous artists like Rudolf Hausner and David Hockney.

After her studies in Hamburg, she went to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Austria in 1972. The next year, she earned a special scholarship from the DAAD to study in Milan, Italy.

Art and Ideas

Since 1973, Soltau has worked as a freelance artist. She started with painting and drawing, but in 1975, she began to explore actions, photography, and video.

A New Way of Making Art

Soltau created a type of performance art she called “Permanente Demonstration,” which means "permanent demonstration." She described it as trying to make an image real by using her own body. For her, the artist and the art were not separate things but part of the same reality.

In a famous series called "Selbst" (which means "Self"), Soltau wrapped her own face with tight black silk threads, almost like a cocoon. She then took photographs of her face wrapped in the threads. Afterward, she would stitch over the photograph, creating a geometric pattern. This created a powerful self-portrait that showed feelings of being held back or silenced. Through this art, Soltau explored the challenges she felt as a woman in society. The thread changes the shape of her face but also highlights its features in a new way.

Art About Life Events

Soltau believed that personal experiences like pregnancy, birth, and sickness could be important subjects for art. Between 1977 and 1980, she created art about her own pregnancies and the birth of her two children.

In a video called "being pregnant," she filmed her body over the nine months of her pregnancy. She documented the physical and emotional changes she went through. She wondered how she could be both a creative artist and a mother without losing her identity as a person.

Family and Generations

One of her most detailed projects is called "generativ" (1994–2005). In this series, she combined photographs of the women in her family: her grandmother, her mother, her daughter, and herself.

The artwork shows how the body changes over a lifetime, from the growing body of a young person to the aging body of an older person. Soltau said, "My main interest is the integration of body process in my work, in order to connect body and spirit as equal parts."

Over time, she also used images of identity cards, passports, and bank statements in her art, turning her face into a collection of data and documents.

Awards and Recognition

Annegret Soltau has received many awards for her work.

• In 1982, she received a scholarship from the Arts Society of Bonn.
• In 1986, she won the prestigious Villa Massimo prize, which allowed her to work in Rome, Italy.
• In 1998, she was awarded the Maria Sybilla Merian Prize in the German State of Hesse.
• In 2000, she won the Wilhelm-Loth-prize from the city of Darmstadt, where she lives.

Exhibitions

Soltau's art has been shown in museums all over the world.

• A major retrospective, or review of her life's work, was held at the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt in 2006.
• From 2007 to 2009, her work was part of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, a famous exhibition that traveled to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York, and Vancouver.
• In 2012, her art was featured in an exhibition in Florence, Italy, alongside the work of artist Francis Bacon.
• From 2013 to 2017, her work toured Europe as part of "WOMAN. Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s," with stops in Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, and Austria.
• Her art continues to be shown in important exhibitions about feminist art, the human body, and family.

See also

In Spanish: Annegret Soltau para niños