Heidrun Rathgeb
Heidrun Rathgeb’s practice celebrates - in her words - ‘moments that feel like daily epiphanies’. Whether drawing from the dramatic landscape surrounding her home or capturing intimate moments within domesticity, Heidrun’s small-scale paintings and limited edition prints explore ‘states of being’ within today’s often frenetic world.
Heidrun works using a range of traditional and contemporary printmaking techniques including woodcut, etching and monoprint. Hand-printed outside the confines of a commercial studio, each individual print is characterised by unique variations inherent in the fluidity of the printing process. Her painting and printmaking practices are closely linked. In Heidrun’s words: ‘With some of my paintings I think – I have to go further, I have to turn them into something else again, and that would be the starting point for a woodcut. I see it as a process…from a drawing, to a painting to a print. I make a woodcut when I feel the need for deep concentration in working…it’s almost a zen-like type of concentration – that’s what reduction woodcut demands’.
Heidrun was born in Germany but moved to London in 1993 to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art followed by the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Her work has been exhibited in regular solo and group exhibitions in the UK and Germany. Travel is key within her practice; she has undertaken artistic residencies in Norway, Denmark, France, Scotland, Spain, Italy and India. Oliver Projects exhibited Heidrun’s prints at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in 2021 and 2022, and also in 2022, John Martin Gallery, London, presented the first solo exhibition of her paintings in the UK. Most recently, a solo exhibition of Heidrun’s work was presented by 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in New York, USA (March 2023).
Heidrun currently lives and works in rural south Germany, with views from her home of Lake Constance and the Alps.