Sabina Bockemühl

Sabina Bockemühl celebrates life in all its diversity. With expressive forms and vibrant color she breaks boundaries and invites viewers to discover new perspectives. Each work tells stories, reflects experience, and awakens hidden worlds within us. It is an invitation to question the ordinary and embrace the unknown.

Born in 1966 in Solingen, Bockemühl is an artist whose work moves decisively between portrait and gesture, surface and depth. Her painting is powerful, direct and often large in scale. It claims space and gives space. It is not smooth likenesses but dense, characterful condensations that define her style. Her portraits do not depict faces; they articulate attitudes: open, vulnerable, resolute.

After various stages of study and training in Germany and Spain, including under Prof. Markus Lüpertz and designer Dieter Sieger, Bockemühl founded her first studio in 1990. Today she lives and works in Murnau am Staffelsee, where she has also established her own painting academy. Her artistic approach is as physical as it is analytical. The canvas becomes a place of confrontation with the subject, with color, with herself. Acrylic, charcoal, modeling paste and at times collage elements come into play, often layered, overpainted, fractured.

Bockemühl’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Frauenmuseum Bonn, the Kunstmuseum Solingen, the Museum of Contemporary Art Diether Kunerth and the Art Palace in Prague. In her most recent series she explores themes of self-assertion, vulnerability and memory with striking clarity, beyond any programmatic definition. Her painting remains a physical act: forceful, singular, unmistakable.

Artist Statement
In the Breath of Time – Images of Connection

“My paintings arise where creative force and transience meet. I seek those moments of transition in which people, urban spaces, landscapes, or the quiet presence of an animal reveal more than their form: a subtle equilibrium where becoming and fading can be felt at once. Every motif is part of a living cycle; it speaks of connection — of the traces we leave in the world and of the world’s traces that remain within us.

From color, light, and atmosphere emerge pictorial spaces that reach beyond what is visible. Transparent layers, condensations, and deliberately open spaces create zones of resonance: rather than explaining, they invite viewers to rediscover their own relationship to nature — and to their own nature. Thus, the fragile balance between humanity and environment is not proclaimed but experienced — as a quiet rhythm that slows the gaze, sharpens the senses, and restores a sense of belonging.

In my work, the human being does not stand outside the landscape but within its fabric — as creator and as creature. Where urban structures encounter organic forms, where a silhouette flickers in the wind, or where a glance carries time within it, our unity of creativity and responsibility becomes clear. Beauty appears here not as surface, but as attitude: a mindful preservation of the living, fully aware of its transience.

I understand my art as an invitation to cross boundaries — between inside and outside, culture and nature, past and possibility. When my paintings move people across the world, encouraging them to rediscover their connection to themselves and to nature, and to align their actions with greater awareness, they fulfill their purpose: perception becomes relationship, and relationship becomes responsibility. In this sense, I paint — so that the world that shapes us may be equally protected and enlivened by us.”