In these often monumental fictive self portraits I use my own image to enact different female characters, questioning gender roles, identity, place and social norms. I like to investigate stereotypes of female representation, female archetypes  like the seductress and mother, saint and sister,  as well as to slip into the guise of historic figures and escape into different times. If the gaze is returned, it can create an uneasy dialogue with the audience, the object becomes the subject, the viewer the voyeur, caught... I try to capture the fragile equilibrium of a moment between dream and wake, a dance across the canvas, an internal landscape that comes alive in a sea of brushstrokes, an entanglement that one finds refuge from by directing one's gaze to the depicted figures that inhabit this unsteady world, figures freed from time and space resting in an unstable fragile equilibrium of opposites. It is a dialectic world. Only a delicate thread unites this inner sphere with the outer world. By investigating that space between dream and reality I align myself to a time past, the Viennese Modern between 1870 and 1920, a phase of turmoil and change in history, a new role of the unconscious brought out by Sigmund Freud, a new role of women as depicted in the paintings of the painters of the Viennese Secession. A time of turmoil and change not so unlike our current times...