Manja McCade – Painting What Can’t Be Said

I am Manja McCade, a contemporary abstract artist living and working in Dessau — a city shaped by the spirit of the Bauhaus, reinvention, and quiet radicalism. After more than a decade in Leipzig, I relocated here in 2024 to find space, stillness, and a deeper connection to my materials, themes, and artistic voice.

My paintings unfold on old fabrics: antique linens, found textiles, materials already carrying their own histories. These surfaces — worn, fragile, imperfect — become collaborators in the work. They hold memory in their fibers, whispering of lives lived, softness, labor, loss. Onto them, I layer oil, line, instinct, and interruption. Sometimes raw, sometimes meditative. Each piece becomes a trace, a fracture, a question. Something human that refuses to stay silent.

Themes of vulnerability, resistance, and transformation anchor my work. They are personal and political, intimate and collective. Contemporary art is never neutral; it carries weight, context, and consequence. It holds history. It holds heat.

My commitment to artistic activism led me to create work in support of Julian Assange, including my project Belmarsh Live. Through installation and visual storytelling, I translated the isolation, urgency, and injustice of his imprisonment into a physical experience — bearing witness, challenging silence, and keeping the conversation alive through art. That project was never only about him; it was about all of us. About truth, accountability, and the fragile architecture of freedom.

Now that Julian is free, the energy doesn’t vanish — it transforms. The fight becomes memory, and memory becomes material.

At the center of my practice is this: I paint what can’t be said.
What is carried in the body.
What lingers in the dark.
What resists being erased.

If you step close to my paintings, you might find a piece of yourself in the layers — or a moment that refuses to fade.