For Manuela Sambo, the small art scene in the GDR offered a new home in the years leading to the fall of the Wall. In particular, her engagement with Western art traditions created a filter to look into her personal experiences, the role models and customs of her native Angola. The result is an artistic exploration of reciprocal influences in which Sambo goes back to the Renaissance. With her interpretations of Cranach's Venus, Maria lactans or Lucretia's dagger, the artist makes direct reference to the role and attributions of women in German cultural history. In these paintings, Sambo adopts Cranach's cold and plastic incarnation, which refers to the spiritual shell of humanistic virtues, but not to the maltreated body, the personal sacrifice and the pain of the woman as an individual. Sambo also realizes, that the pale colors and the hard outlines of the figures without much shading, reminded her of the mask tradition in Angola:
"I've always been interested in the nature of masks. A mask transforms everyone into something immaterial, almost like a ghost. The person loses their individuality and becomes abstract. In this context, I also realized that Western modernism had discovered forms of abstraction in the visual language of non-European cultures that were already anchored in me through my origins and are inherent to me. In the process of reflecting on the development of Western art, I was interested in a reversal of this strategy, namely, as an African, to integrate certain parameters of early Western art, especially the Renaissance, into my work." Manuela Sambo
With reference to more recent art history, Sambo also borrows from modernist painters who referred to African mask and jewelry tradition. Incorporating these art-historical quotes into her paintings, Manuela Sambo again creates a double reflection between African origin and European appropriation.