I‘ve never felt hotter - Paula in the studio (W28)

During her pregnancy, Caroline Cramer supported her former flatmate Paula both as a close friend and artistically. During this period, she produced an extensive series of drawings and paintings in which she observed her changing body over several months. The works explore pregnancy as a condensed transitional phase between the past and the future, a moment in which her previous life and her as yet uncertain role as a mother overlap and are processed in parallel. Past desires and goals encounter existential questions, expectations and visions of the future, so that both temporal planes become palpable at the same time. Here, time becomes visible within the body itself. Within a few months, its form changes fundamentally, whilst its future state remains open. Social ideals of beauty and the perception of one’s own body play a role here: the sense of the body shifts, is renegotiated and becomes tangible in the images. The multiple depictions of the same body within a single composition, combined with the overlapping poses, create an ambiguous pictorial time in which different moments are present simultaneously. The dialogical working process between model and artist shifts the art-historically defined relationship between artist and muse, which has long defined the female nude. Against the backdrop of current social debates on motherhood, care work and equality, the works open up a space for reflection on how bodies, role models and social change are interconnected.