CHARLOTTE KOLLMORGEN  was born in Dresden/Germany in 1939 and moved to Berlin in 1950 where, after taking the Abitur in 1958, she studied graphic arts and design at the Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts).

She married in 1962 and has two sons (born 1964 and 1967).

After qualifying as a designer, Charlotte Kollmorgen began working as a free-lance painter in 1979. She is a member of the National Association of Artists and exhibits regularly at the Freie Berliner Kunstausstellung (Exhibition Centre for Independent Artists). She has been fascinated in equal measure by large-scale oils on canvas and painting miniatures (see p.11, J. Eucker), which has led to the two picture cycles, Life 1 and Life 2, as well as her miniatures. She held several solo exhibitions in Berlin between 1980-84, and, as a result of her travels to Luxembourg, France, England, USA etc., in Livermore (California), at the Goethe Institute in Toronto and the Thomas Mann Library Luxembourg. Special highlights of her career were an exhibition at the Bâtiment Schumann in the European Parliament and illustrating a children’s book for the Action Familiale et Populaire (Salon des Enfants), both in 1984.

In connection with one of her early exhibitions in a Berlin rehabilitation clinic (Art in the Clinic), Charlotte Kollmorgen developed her collage therapy in 1981. This is an art therapy whose “pure creativity” is especially suited to the complete novice who can apply this method instantly, spontaneously and individually as part of the recovery process after serious illness. In 1983, Charlotte Kollmorgen was invited to the British hospice Springhill/Buckinghamshire to introduce her collage therapy. She spent three weeks there, working with leukaemia patients. From 1983-85 she went back to university to study Art and Therapy which resulted in the publication of her book Collage Therapy (Marhold 1988/ 2. Ed. Hans Huber 1989). Since then she has been working as a painter, art therapist as well as lecturer at several universities.

Based on the collage therapy, Charlotte Kollmorgen has developed further methods. The 1993 Creative — Management with Collages, for example, is designed to build up people’s creativity empathetically and purposefully and help them find new ways of problem-solving. Invitations to attend the World Congress of MedArt International (New York) and the 12th World Congress of Cardiology (Berlin 1993) followed. Charlotte Kollmorgen is a member of several scientific societies, publishes articles and lectures at specialist congresses. Her work has also found recognition with the media. In 1992, she held an exhibition in the famous Kreuzkirche in her native Dresden and, in 1996, from the hands of the German president, Roman Herzog, she received the Order of Merit for her collage therapy, a method that gives people access to their own creativity and its life-enhancing perspectives.

Since 1996 Charlotte Kollmorgen has been concentrating on her work as a painter, resuming her study trips to Rome, USA, England, the Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and India, amongst other places. These travels have opened up new painting perspectives. At the invitation of the German Embassy in the Latvian Republic she held an exhibition in Jaunpils, near Riga in May 2000 as part of the German-Latvian cultural exchange which resulted in her Latvian Impressions 1, 2 & 3.

Future exhibitions are to be held at Castle Plassen in Kulmbach/Bavaria ( August 2001), Artists for Peace (AfP) in Geneva (August 2001) and Galerie Bremer in Berlin (January 2002) where she hopes to find new stimuli in the dialogue with the public.

for a complete curriculum vitae please visit the German curriculum vitae

Translated from the original German Text by Eike Hibbett, Oxford/United Kingdom