“Everything that is incomprehensible does not cease to exist.”
(Blaise Pascal)
 

For 35 years, Düsseldorf-based artist Renate Behla (born in Dresden) has been creating her own unique, enigmatic visual universe through drawing. At work here is a distinctive combinatorial approach—featuring metaphorically charged objects and symbols that draw on myths, stories, philosophy, and etymology, and in part also on the primal depths of the collective visual memory.

Expressed in a highly minimalist visual language, Renate Behla’s works navigate the space between reality and the imaginary. Through her drawings, the artist creates that immaterial mental space of possibilities where everything can have multiple meanings and where the unspeakable becomes visible. In doing so, the motifs transcend the purely personal. Anyone who encounters these works senses their existential urgency.

The presentation of the drawings alongside her objects is part of the tradition of critical engagement with the medium of drawing cultivated at the Museum Morsbroich. The aim is to make the processual nature of Renate Behl’s work comprehensible: how she pursues various visual ideas across multiple works, how things and people transform in the process, and how a multifaceted, cross-media dialogue unfolds.

The exhibition encompasses Renate Behl’s extensive body of drawings and is complemented by a selection of objects, a multimedia installation exploring the “damage images” and the poetics of the bark beetle, as well as a presentation that offers a glimpse into the artist’s mind (“The Artist’s Intimacy,” featuring personal notes, sketches, and sources of inspiration).

Renate Behla’s works have been exhibited on multiple occasions at DIE GROSSE Kunstausstellung NRW in Düsseldorf and at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, as well as in national and international museums, galleries, and institutions (Goethe-Institutes).

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication “Renate Behla. I Draw into an Empty World,” which for the first time provides a comprehensive overview of Renate

Behla’s body of drawings; with texts by Fritz Emslander (curator) and Klaus Sellge
(Germanist / philologist), approx. 176 pages, published by Kettler.
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