Manja McCade – Painting what can’t be said

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

My work unfolds on old fabrics — antique linens, found textiles, materials that carry memory in their fibers. These surfaces, already marked by time, become collaborators in the act of painting. They speak of lives lived, of silence, softness, labor, loss. Onto them I layer oil, line, and gesture — sometimes raw and impulsive, sometimes meditative and spare. Every painting becomes a trace. A question. A fragment of something deeply human.

Themes of vulnerability, resistance, and transformation run through all of my work. They are personal and political, intimate and collective. Art is never neutral. It holds history. It holds heat.

My commitment to artistic activism led me to create work in support of Julian Assange, including a deeply resonant project titled Belmarsh Live. In it, I translated the isolation and urgency of his imprisonment into an art installation and visual storytelling — confronting injustice, bearing witness, and keeping the conversation alive through art. That project was not just about him; it was about all of us. About freedom. About truth. About the cost of silence.

Now, with Julian free, the energy doesn’t disappear — it transforms. The fight becomes memory, and memory becomes art.

What remains central to my practice is this: I paint what can’t be said. What is felt in the body. What lingers in silence. What resists being forgotten.

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