Collection: Renate Gehrcke

Renate Gehrcke: A Life of Artistic Creation

Renate Gehrcke can now look back on a rich body of artistic work. From the beginning of her career in the 1960s until today, she has been deeply engaged with the essence of movement in life. Capturing movement became the guiding principle of her work. Gehrcke perceives all existence as a creative activity in constant transformation and aligns herself with the traditions of modernism.

Gehrcke comes from a family of artists: her grandfather Rudolf von Laban, renowned in his time, is considered a pioneer of modern expressive dance, and her father, Max Hofer, was a late impressionist painter. These family traditions continue to influence Renate Gehrcke’s creative process. Many of her charcoal drawings translate modern expressive dance into works of visual art, extending the dancers’ movements onto paper. For her, the focus is not on a specific person but on fundamental questions of life and human existence. The dancer serves as her source of inspiration: sometimes passionate and impetuous, sometimes playful and childlike, or festive and elegant. Gehrcke weaves this thread further with an existentialist approach, capturing in precious fleetingness what lies beyond the perfect form of the dancer’s body.

In her dynamic drawings, Gehrcke draws inspiration from the external world, while her free paintings are driven by impulses from within. Even in her paintings, one could describe them as “dance space images,” but here the artist dances herself while painting. Using her entire body, she allows herself to be carried by the act of painting, merging dance and art into one. Both the dancing and the painting arise from the movement of her whole body.

Thus, the circle is complete: the unifying element between her figurative drawings and abstract paintings is movement. Inner experiences are expressed outwardly, preserved both in Gehrcke’s drawings and her paintings.

Gehrcke’s gestural paintings are detached from representational forms. She creates vivid, often large-scale compositions where ribbon-like layers of color are organically interwoven. These images frequently evoke the impression of a living body. At the same time, Gehrcke knows that the unspoken often holds greater intrigue. The viewer’s inner eye is invited to complete what is merely suggested on the canvas.