Heidrun Rathgeb °1967, Tettnang, Germany.

'As we walked'

I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life
Mary Oliver

Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.

Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.

How do we render the complexity of our most layered, interior lives? Heidrun Rathgeb is an observer to reality, using her paintbrush to document and remember the most intimate, everyday moments of existence. To stand in front of her paintings, or to hold one in your hand - as they are often small - is to bear witness to quiet moments and small joys: her daughters asleep on a sofa, the geometry of a blanket after a long day’s walk, the moon shimmering through a window, two cups of tea on a sill.

Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Rathgeb has turned to her immediate environment as the source for her luminous egg tempera paintings on panel. As a student, she painted on a large scale but soon reverted to smaller panels that could adjust to the dimensions of life marked by domestic spaces, by six children, by nature, by land, by water. Rathgeb is as much an artist as she is an adventurer. Now, living in southern Germany, her life is punctuated by a rhythm of long walks among the lakes and landscapes of Europe, abounding with mountains and large expanses of sky.

In As we walked, we are let into Rathgeb’s recent experiences as she took walking trips with her adolescent children. As she always does, on each journey, she carried a small A6 sketchbook with her, as if to capture forever the particularities of what made that trip just so; the light fixture common in Danish homes, the globe, the early morning swim, the interior of a cabin, the tea after a day’s trek. Sometimes the figures look out to the wild beyond, standing or sitting on their own but never alone; Rathgeb is there, bearing witness, a few paces behind.

Looking at these paintings, I am reminded of early renaissance Sienese painters, who similarly used egg tempera with teeny brushes to render the most fantastical shades of existence. Their works were always miraculous, as if visual acknowledgements that this - whatever it was - really happened. As if to whisper, yes, come in, look. Like in those paintings, colour in Rathgeb’s work is curious, offbeat, vivid. Her source drawings are black and white, so colour is decided by memory and by feeling rather than fidelity.
Mary Oliver, the American poet who in her writing connected landscape and the human heart, once wrote that attention is the beginning of devotion. Rathgeb, like the Sienese painters, knows that to be true too. Individual diptychs and triptychs, small wooden boards hinged together as if books to be opened, stories to be pieced together and read, recall early paintings for prayer; pictures that worshippers could carry on their bodies and use for the most private contemplation. You see a wall of these painted objects in the gallery, but others exist too – one of her daughters took one to Norway, another to Peru to carry with her as she, too, walked. It is as if to say, that life, these paintings – in all their majesty – are born of love, love, love/ along the shining beach, or the rubble, or dust.

• Wells Fray-Smith, February 2025