“Color is strength, tenderness, hope, but also fear and sadness”, with these words publisher Wolfgang Jean Stock quotes the Münsingen expressionist Ruth Kohler in the art book “Celebration of Color” recently published by Hirmer. On 128 high-quality pages, he and the graphic designer Berndkuchenbeiser managed to capture the essence of Ruth Kohler.
In his foreword, Stock not only provides a knowledgeable outline of the process by which color freed itself from the object in modern pictorial art. He also highlights Ruth Kohler, the daughter of a pastor who was born in Fürth, in 200 years of art history and almost 93 years of life history. He does not locate her painterly roots in the French Impressionists, but in the English landscape and cloud painters John Constable and William Turner.
After the Second World War, Kohler became a master student and “Michelangelina” of the church painter Franz Nagel. Moves in with her sister in Africa, where she begins to paint at the easel. Travels the world with her husband, the documentary filmmaker Werner Prym. Exhibits in New York, Berlin, Paris and London. And found her home in Münsing on Lake Starnberg in 1972. Her unique abstract-expressionist paintings, which radiate power, energy and dynamism and at the same time have a youthful freshness and zest for life, are still created there today.
A woman like Ruth Kohler hardly fits between two book covers, even if they are covered with high-quality linen – which Kohler would probably have painted and painted over in her studio in no time at all. Multiple. At almost 93 years of age, she still stands in front of the canvas almost every day, works with her whole body and “fights”, as she puts it, with the paint.
Her pictures are actually too big to fit in a book. The idea of enlarging sections of her paintings is all the more convincing: spaces open up, the finest traces become apparent, abysses open up. In this way, Kohler’s paintings become a completely new discovery even for connoisseurs, a “celebration of colour” and a feast for the eye and soul.
The official book presentation is planned for Friday, April 29th, in the DG-Kunstraum Discourse Contemporary (Finkenstraße 4 Munich, beginning at 6 p.m.). Kohler is currently exhibiting two paintings there as part of the “Notre Dame” group exhibition. Wolfgang Jean Stock will conduct an artist talk with her and explain the book project. The flautists Charlotte Kuffer and Maria Ose will provide the musical supporting program. “Celebration of Color”, ISBN 978-3-7774-4022-4, costs 29.90 euros.