Biography
I am Susanne Witzig and was born in 1971 in the former GDR in Merseburg/Saale. I grew up in a system that offered no place for me as a child with a special talent in the poetic and artistic field. Very early on, I had a completely different perception of color than all the other children in my environment, for example, I was never satisfied with the basic colors such as blue, red and yellow in art class. Rather, I mixed my own colors, such as pink, green or orange, and I always painted as I perceived things and not as they looked in reality. Unfortunately, my special talent was not promoted, but I was punished for bad grades when I once again missed the topic.
At the age of 12, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness that was very much characterized by discipline, renunciation, pain and suffering. There was little space and time for emotions and things that a child or adolescent normally does. These limitations led to the fact that all emotions and talents were stifled and put me on a conventional career path. Until 2015, I led excessive functioning between file folders in an open-plan office, until I suffered a physical and mental breakdown due to serious consequences of my chronic illness and a dissociative movement disorder and have been wheelchair bound 90% ever since.
All the emotions and insights that come with this process are evident in her artworks. Abstract painting is above all an expression of her soul and is reflected in the liveliness of her paintings. For Susanne Witzig, painting what she feels is nothing more than the enthusiastic affirmation of life, which includes love as well as enthusiasm, inspiration and creativity.

At the age of 12, her already difficult life, which was also due to family reasons, was massively exacerbated by the diagnosis of a serious chronic illness. Not only was her illness highly stigmatized in the former GDR, this situation was actually exploited to finally re-educate her into a well-adjusted child. Her entire creative and emotional expression was silenced through manipulative psychological and physical violence. Witzig fought her way through her unpleasant childhood, spent most of her youth alone behind books and tried to move as inconspicuously as possible in society. She embarked on a conventional career path that led to a psychological and physical breakdown due to constant, excessive self-overexertion and excessive workloads. The far-reaching secondary illnesses resulting from her chronic illness in particular forced Witzig to take long, compulsory breaks and ultimately meant that she has been 90% wheelchair-bound since the end of 2015. But the recovery phases also had many positive effects, because through art therapy in various clinics she found herself and her love, painting. Painting gave her emotional release, it allowed her to let her feelings flow into her painting work, which leads to lively, abstract expressions that resonate with deep emotional authenticity.
In particular, Witzig’s style of geometric painting is unique and is characterized by the use of bright, intense, vibrant colors that illustrate the chaos and passion within her. Each canvas is a struggle, a dialogue between her inner turmoil and the peace she is trying to find. Art historian Elvira Meisel-Kemper describes her style as contemporary expressive and constructively abstract. Witzig’s painting is not just about creating art, but is a therapeutic ritual that helps her cope with the emotional and physical challenges that arise from her illness. Her geometric works thus show the background created emotionally and with passionate devotion through intuitively chosen colors. In the foreground you can often find the soft, highly sensitive core in the form of circles, curves, air bubbles, but also the hard, pragmatic dominant reality, which in the symbiosis always tries to push itself to the fore, represented in triangles, squares and lines of various thicknesses. The playful and almost unnoticed symmetry of the elements illustrates the ambivalence between what could be and what actually exists.
The great art in Witzig’s pictures lies in the back and forth between highly emotional color frenzy and cerebral expressivity and constructivity, without appearing kitschy or overloaded. Lovers of Witzig’s works of art say that you never get tired of them because their complexity touches the soul. Everything that viewers are willing to feel and experience can be found in Witzig’s works of art.


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