Henry James once wrote that a man of genius takes the faintest hints of life and turns them into revelations. In Dream On Baby: Artists and Their Childhood Memories (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2024), Gesine Borcherdt reveals how artists transform the traces of their childhood experiences, including pain, trauma, unconventionality, and fond memories, into profound artistic creations.

Dream On Baby offers an insight into the formative experiences of some of today’s most provocative and visionary artists. Through intimate and sensitive profiles, Borcherdt reveals how childhood – that raw, tender and sometimes brutal landscape – continues to echo through the creative lives of thirty-three international artists. With a blend of empathy, curatorial insight and journalistic precision, Borcherdt offers more than a series of biographical sketches; she presents a compelling thesis on how the residue of early experience feeds the roots of artistic imagination.

The book stems from Borcherdt’s dual identity as an art critic and curator. “Throughout my life as a journalist and curator with many artist friends,” she explains for culture.lu, “I have always been curious about the person behind the work. Every time I asked them about the roots of their art, the artists immediately went back to their childhood. But neither did these personal stories get enough space in art magazines, nor acceptance in institutional publications, where they didn’t seem scientific enough or were seen as too lifestyle-like. Nevertheless, I felt that these wonderful, funny and heartbreaking memories needed to be heard, in order to bring another level to the understanding of their work.” 

In the foreword, she recounts how the 2020 exhibition Dream Baby Dream at Haus Mödrath near Cologne evolved into this book. “Due to the number of artists in the exhibition,” Borcherdt explains, “it was much less of an extensive exchange with each and every one of them. The focus was more on their works, on how they obviously reflect unprocessed childhood experience or trauma.” The book format allowed her to go deeper: “The book idea came up two years later and shows a broader range of artists I have mostly worked with previously in one way or the other, and who thankfully trusted me and took the time to share their memories.” The result is a collection that is simultaneously a psychological inquiry, a cultural history, and a visual autobiography. 

This unique book is lavishly illustrated with never-before-seen childhood photographs and drawings, as well as reproductions of some iconic artworks. These visual testimonies are accompanied by evocative narrative profiles in which Borcherdt gently guides artists to reveal the origins of their artistic callings and their auto-poetics. Borcherdt acknowledges that good art transcends biography, yet she also insists that biography matters, particularly when it comes to comprehending the intensity and necessity behind certain artistic decisions. Through her interviews, she explores the delicate threshold where personal memory becomes a generative aesthetic force. “It was very important for me”, Borcherdt notes, “to let only the artists’ voices speak instead of me coming up with essayistic interpretations about how their childhood influenced their art. It makes a difference that these are all their quotes and not essays by third parties, which carry a risk to read their work through a lens of private mythologies.”

When we immerse ourselves in the world of Dream On Baby, we encounter Marina Abramović’s stunningly honest account of growing up under cold, militaristic discipline in post-war Belgrade, for instance. Her brutal upbringing, complete with punishments and emotional deprivation, emerges as the foundation of her performative endurance art. “The more fucked-up your childhood, the better an artist you’ll become,” she states. In contrast, Ai Weiwei’s recollections reveal how exile, labour camps and authoritarian oppression shaped his rebellious ethos and his belief that art is a form of political resistance. The compelling testimony of those artists, who have experienced childhood trauma, tempts us to single it out as the most powerful creative force. “I am tempted to agree,” Borcherdt reflects. “Many of the greatest artists of the late 19th to the 21st century – from Edvard Munch to Louise Bourgeois to Tracey Emin – whose works are emotionally touching, could never have been made without that painful experience. When trauma is transformed in art, it radiates this pain, this inner urge to express what otherwise would stay oppressed inside the body and brain. To me, this kind of art is much stronger than work that just stems from formalistic ideas or other problems that lie outside of the artist. Having said that, of course it’s not enough to just let trauma drive the work. In the end it’s the shape, the material, the entire way the work asserts itself that makes it great art and not art therapy.”

Several artists describe unusually peculiar or unconventional upbringings that profoundly shaped their worldview and artistic path. Julius von Bismarck, for instance, spent his early years in Saudi Arabia surrounded by desert landscapes and strict cultural contrasts, while King Cobra (formerly Doreen Lynette Garner) grew up exploring anatomy, trauma, and skin through both personal loss and early artistic experimentation – experiences that later fueled her powerful and unsettling sculptural work. One particularly striking example of how an atypical childhood experience can shape an artist’s work is found in the story of Yehudit Sasportas: “She is an incredible example of a very unusual upbringing that very much informed her work,” Borcherdt points out. “Growing up in Ashdod in this special house full of books and with inbuilt furniture designed by the father in order to change the functions of the rooms, had a huge impact on her artistic drive. But then the catastrophe happened: her brother was kidnapped and killed by a terrorist organization when she had just enrolled in art school, which completely changed her life and the life of her family, which all of a sudden became very public in the media and politics. At some point she turned inwards, stopped talking and focused on a kind of automatic, meditative drawing which is still a refuge for her today.”

While many artists in Dream On Baby reflect on trauma or hardship, some recall happy childhoods marked by freedom, imagination, and close ties to nature or family.  “As you can see from my book,” notes Borcherdt, “most artists come from average families. There seems to be a strong desire to fight your way into a different world.” Jean-Marie Appriou, we learn, found his creative spark in wonder, citing the misty shores of Brittany, korrigan folklore and enchanted lakes, and the tactile joy of working with clay as influences. Jeff Koons, for example, recalls a happy and supportive childhood. He describes growing up in Pennsylvania with parents who encouraged his creativity – his father even displayed Jeff’s early paintings in the family’s furniture store, fostering his confidence and sense of possibility from a young age. “Practically every artist’s story surprised me,” concludes Borcherdt. All of these childhood stories, whether happy, unhappy or unconventional, are unique and have found their way into art. Sometimes in a more obvious way, sometimes not. “I might have had an idea about some of them, or it was kind of obvious that the work stems from childhood, even though the work doesn’t talk about it in your face,” Borcherdt reveals. “But all those told details and the incredible sensitivity that came out in every single conversation deeply moved me.” 

Dream On Baby is a generous, moving and insightful exploration of the work of Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Jean-Marie Appriou, Kader Attia, Lynda Benglis, Richard Billingham, Julius von Bismarck, Berlinde De Bruyckere, King Cobra (Doreen Lynette Garner), Vaginal Davis, Marcel Dzama, VALIE EXPORT, Abdulnasser Gharem, Mona Hatoum, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jeff Koons, Ronny Lischinski, Liu Ye, Mike Nelson, Ernesto Neto, Tony Oursler, Jon Rafman, Mary-Audrey Ramirez, Yehudit Sasportas, Gregor Schneider, Laurie Simmons, Lily van der Stokker, Ryan Trecartin, Jean-Luc Verna, Raphaela Vogel, Andro Wekua, Jordan Wolfson and Wong Ping. The book shows us how their childhoods reverberate throughout the studio, gallery and performance spaces. It also reminds us that art often emerges from vulnerability, as individuals search for meaning amidst confusion, cruelty and beauty.