Figuration - Birgitt Bolsmann, Almut Heise, Rissa
Drawings, works on paper, painting
2 MAY until 21 MAY 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm
On the occasion of Gallery Weekend 2025, we put a focus on the artists Birgitt Bolsman, Almut Heise and Rissa, all three consciously placing representationalism at the centre of their work – thus belonging to the movement that emerged in the early 1960s and which marks a turning away from Abstraction and Art Informel. Drawing as a medium is of particular importance in clarifying their own artistic position.
Installation view, 2021,
Group show with works by Rissa and Birgitt Bolsmann at Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner.
Photo: anna.k.o. Berlin
Birgitt Bolsmann (1944–2000) already tried her hand at a reality orientated painting while studying in Hamburg. She draws her subjects largely from fashion photography and striking advertising, which she critically examines in terms of the image of women that they propagate. In her painting she fixes her subjects with great clarity using a cool colour scheme. The selection of works on show demonstrates that Bolsman was an outstanding draughtswoman. From 1973 on, she created meticulously executed pencil drawings of portraits and masks as well as fashion and garment studies in dense, visually finely graded grey shades.
Almut Heise
Korridor II
Farbstift, Aquarell, Collage auf Papier
49,1 x 28,1 cm
Courtesy: Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner / Almut Heise
Photo: Lea Gryze, Berlin © 2025 Almut Heise, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
My pictures are realistic only to the extent that one can believe from what one sees, that things could exist that way. I am not interested in whether it really exists. I want to make one believe it. I want to paint objects and deal with objects and quotations like other people deal with colours and shapes.
Almut Heise, cit. in: Almut Heise. Gemälde 1968–1999. Exhibit. cat. Handelskammer Hamburg, 9.–29.8.2000, Hamburg 2000, p. 22.
As disciplined as the form-colour facture of my pictures may appear, their content is intended to stimulate the viewer’s imagination. My pictures are an impulse, they want to provoke and bring something new. But they are not forcing the viewer in any particular direction, neither formally nor in terms of content.
Rissa: Über meine Malerei, cit. in: Rissa, Gemälde und Zeichnungen. Exhib. cat. Galerie AXIOM, Köln 1978, s.p.
Rissa
Flüsternde bei Nacht
Gouache and Ink
36 x 48 cm
Courtesy: Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner / Privatsammlung
Photo: © 2025 Archiv K. O. Götz und Rissa-Stiftung / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Birgitt Bolsmann
Hohle Schönheit, 1977
Pencil drawing, 46,3 x 35,2 cm
Courtesy: Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner / Kurt Haug (Estate Birgitt Bolsmann), Neumünster
Photo: Angeline Schube-Focke
While studying, I had a close look at abstract art and I noticed that I cannot make use of it to depict the issues that really affect me. I wish to apply a straight visual language, as many people as possible should be able to understand it without turning to an art mediation for explanation.
Birgitt Bolsmann, cit. in: Lichtblick 1988, p. 8.
With similar precision Almut Heise (*1944), who studied in Hamburg and London, constructs her compositions. Since the mid-1960s, she created an extensive body of drawings and works on paper in colour, concentrating on interiors and portraits, in the beginning preparing paintings, but later on as more autonomous works. Heise does not reproduce reality. Being a sharp observer, she stylised her subjects which seem to be detached from space and time. Every fold, every wallpaper pattern and every gesture is tried out until the “longed-for rooms” have emerged.
Rissa’s (*1938) artistic conception is based on the idea of creating a future-orientated, object-related painting both in terms of content and form. Defined at the end of her studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1964, her approach relies on the juxtaposition of small scale structures of form and colour from the outlines of which the pictorial objects emerge.
The medium of drawing accompanies Rissa’s working process for a canvas painting; nevertheless, there are autonomous work series in which she varies pictorial ideas in a large scale.