Luisa Richter

Luisa Richter (1928–2015) studied under Willi Baumeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart from 1949 to 1955. Through her marriage to the engineer Hans Joachim Richter she relocated to Caracas. Nonetheless she would spend the majority of the year at her parents’ home in Besigheim until into the 1990s.

Richter’s work reflects both European and Latin American influences. During her stays in Besigheim she produced expressive figurative paintings in the tradition of Willi Baumeister and Hans Fähnle. In Caracas, influenced by the brilliant tropical light, she painted abstract, geometric “planar spaces;” for her, their prismatically broken three-dimensionality reflected the complexity of life. She achieved her international breakthrough with these “planar spaces,” which were exhibited as the Venezuelan contribution at the Venice Biennial in 1978. Besides these oil paintings Richter also focuses on the medium of collage, interlacing drawn and glued-on components to form multilayered, associative entities. In these collages she highlights the political and social relationships between people and their surroundings.

In addition to the Gego exhibition, one floor of the Cube was devoted to the work of Luisa Richter. The presentation focused on her collages, supplemented by her paintings of the “planar spaces.”