Throughout her artistic career, Christa Dichgans' work has been characterized by two things: the representation of reality and its condensation in painting. It is precisely this ambivalence that has shaped her rise to become the grande dame of German Pop Art.
Image gallery
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The works shown here, the cycle Robert, were created when her son Robert was a toddler and Dichgans herself was still studying at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. The paintings depict scenes from her son's everyday life-and from her own-as she navigates the art world of the time and begins her own journey as an artist, young woman, and mother.
The paintings of her son at play are equally playful and full of movement toward artistic maturity and independence. They are marked by her engagement with her nearest and dearest, and consequently with herself as an artist and as a human being.
The clear and sure lines of her Pop language are not yet manifest here. In these early paintings, a tendency toward abstraction is evident, blurring the boundaries between the objects depicted and eluding a clear demarcation between still life and genre scene, between objects and people, a phenomenon that also bears witness to a preoccupation with the French Nabis at the end of the 19th century.
