Iwajla Klinke

Iwajla Klinke is an internationally acclaimed multi-award winning artist from Germany.

Born in 1976, in Greifswald, Germany. She studied art history and political science, Jewish and Islamic studies, at Freie Universität, in Berlin. She still lives in Berlin.

The precision and the classical aesthetic of her portraits, evoke some of the great baroque painters of the golden age, such as van Dyck or Caravaggio.

Her systematic plastic language, black background and natural light, causes the characters to arise, giving them a poetic and disconcerting aspect at the same time. She builds a unified, utopian world, without geographical or historical reference marks.

Most often, the celebrations gather children and teenagers who dress up, disguise themselves, put on a cloak, and pass from one sexual identity to another, creating vertigo and confusion. But although she is preoccupied with the age before puberty "Because it is the time before a transformation", her work is not limited to sexual identities. Her research on clothing is at the service of another research, more intimate, more interior. She questions the visitor on the way he expresses or hides his identities and how they follow one another or overlap in his own life.