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- charlotte schleiffert - tolerance test
Charlotte Schleiffert
Tolerance test
Tolerance Test is a unique, one-time installation that vividly and highly relevantly showcases the so-called large drawings by Charlotte Schleiffert. These larger-than-life large drawings are inhabited by hybrid beings: people Schleiffert encounters on the street, virtuously combined with celebrities from film or television or from photos in newspapers and magazines. They are grotesque characters, born from collages of eras, styles, cultures, and genders.
Theatrical Presentation
It has been twenty years since Schleiffert created her first hybrid on paper, and since then she has produced an impressive number of nearly eighty large drawings. In Tolerance Test, Schleiffert’s fantasy creatures have come together in a circle for the first time. The installation consists of a selection of large drawings—some over 3.5 meters tall—arranged in a circular formation, which visitors view from the center. The works are presented with light and narrative: light to direct the viewer’s gaze, and narrative to give the creatures a voice, both individually and as a group.
The Dynamics of Society
Schleiffert’s fantasy heroes open up a current frontier in our society, where nature clashes with culture, body with mind, masculinity with femininity, rich with poor, beauty with ugliness, chaos with order, barbarism with civilization. Her creations reveal how mass media, consumerism, eroticism, power, inequality, and abuse are seamlessly intertwined. They expose the mechanisms that shape today’s society and show us how this world may intensify even further.
Presented as a group portrait, the large drawings reveal the dynamics that both build and break society: a power struggle that makes our world so fascinating, inspiring, yet at the same time so terribly deceptive. So deceptive that we must ask ourselves how far we want to go in confronting the injustice and inequality that Schleiffert’s fantasy figures—or are they simply people?—consciously and unconsciously reveal. A tolerance test, then: powerful and poignant, made possible by the strength of the work and its theatrical presentation.
During the exhibition, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, in collaboration with the artists, organizes an extensive activities program, including workshops on charcoal firing and drawing with charcoal. The various artists will also be working in the exhibition on certain days, allowing the public to watch over their shoulders and ask questions.
