Elke Wassmann

Elke Wassmann


Elke Wassmann was born 1937 in Kiel, she studied at the Werkkunstschule Mannheim with Prof. Paul Berger Bergner and Prof. Geissler Kasmekat. She spent several years travelling in Mexico, USA, Turkey, Greece. Wassmann has participated in many group and solo exhibitions at home and abroad. Her artwork has been used for seven cover illustrations for the environmental magazine “Nature” by Horst Stern. In 1994 she won the Willibald-Kramm- Foundation prise.

Elke Wassmann lives and works in Heidelberg and is a founding member and current officer of the Heidelberg painters circle.

About her artworks, the artist says: “The world has an invisible dimension of depth. True masters juggle known things that may seem absurd in the context of dreams. We enter all the secret interior rooms of the dream, where we walk around, have experience and see things that we, if we remember afterwards, find mysterious and strange. “

The artworks of Elke Wassmann, as she suggests, are the representation of subjective states that are beyond wakefulness and awareness. It is a surreal world that confronts the viewer and the boundaries between inside and outside are not defined clearly. According to this statement, Elke Wassmann’s artworks are not influenced by a pre-thought-out plan, but from the first, the pictures are created spontaneously. It is only after the completion of the artwork that a rational interpretation is possible. This emphasis on the imagination and the retrieval of the unconscious as a basis for the artwork follows in the tradition of Surrealist painting.