The Archiv Charlotte Posenenske, a space dedicated to the artist within the Mehdi Chouakri Wilhelm Hallen, presents the second part of the exhibition Anfänge der Form: Charlotte posenenske auf papier. After the first chapter, which focused on works from 1956 to 1959, this presentation turns to works on paper from 1960 to 1965. Before her celebrated shift to sculpture and industrial production, Posenenske developed a substantial body of works on paper that explored gesture, abstraction, and spatial concerns.

Between 1960 and 1961, Posenenske produced a series of abstract landscapes inspired by the Taunus Hills, the Black Forest, and her travels in France and Switzerland. Executed with palette knife or pencil, these works depict rugged cliffs, forests, and meadows as crystalline structures, nets, and grids. Far from traditional representation, the landscapes became laboratories for abstraction – where the natural world generated depersonalised gesture and structural form.

During this period, Posenenske worked exclusively on paper, employing oil, acrylic, poster paint, Indian ink, charcoal, and pencil. Her use of modest formats and ephemeral media contrasted with the heroic stance of Art Informel, while still critically engaging with its gestural vocabulary. In 1964, she developed a group of red, blue, and black drawings later known as the “gestural works”. These pieces, created alongside her illusionistic Spray Pictures and Constructivist Striped Pictures, embody a dramatic tension between expressive freedom and systematic restraint.

By 1965, Posenenske’s practice expanded into works using strips of adhesive tape and folded paper. These experiments marked her first steps into literal, three-dimensional relief space and paved the way for her later sculptural production.