This year I started to change my concept of colour and forms. I wanted to go back to the basics and therefore started to free myself from almost all strong colours and replaced them with natural colour tones like: umbra; ocker; black and white.

The background material has also changed to big pieces of strong thick and naturally produced paper which harmonises with the colours of the paintings themselves. The motives have remained mainly figurative, which continues to be the easiest way for me to express my feelings. My paintings are composed in a very compact way, a way in which you could reduce them to the shape of an egg - my symbol of all beginning.

In the main series called, 'Women' I have composed paintings which integrate moods, feelings and thoughts about life. The subject woman was used as a metaphor. They can give life; they can develop something within them; they embody creation. My previous obsession with using hands as a symbol has now been replaced by a more abstract organic/embryotic symbol which, on the one hand seems to be completely absorbed within the painting - but on the other hand has the urgency, the desire to break out of it. This should not only be seen as something organic, something realistic. It could also be the thoughts, the feelings one has and which need to be freed and released but somehow are imprisoned within.

There is one more symbol remaining in my work - the spiral. It is something which represents motion, movement and something never-ending- permanent which could go on forever and ever.

Looking at the series of 'Women' - which isn't completed yet - one can see it developing into more and more reduced forms, which eventually will result in ...

The series 'women' has never been shown in public before and had its debut at ARTEXPO 99 in New York.

1999