Elvira Bach Germany, b. 1951

Elvira Bach was born on 22 June 1951 in Neuenhain im Taunus, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin. Between 1967 and 1970 she trained at the Staatliche Glasfachschule Hadamar, before moving to Berlin and enrolling at the Hochschule der Künste (University of Fine Arts), where she studied painting from 1972 to 1979. She subsequently completed a Meisterschüler degree under the painter Hann Trier between 1979 and 1982. During her student years she worked at the Schaubühne theatre in Berlin, an experience that sharpened her sensitivity to the body as spectacle and performance. In 1982 she undertook an artist residency in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and between 1986 and 1992 made regular working visits to Senegal, both experiences feeding directly into the chromatic intensity and physical confidence of her mature work.

The female figure is the fixed centre of Elvira Bach's practice. Her paintings present women who are monumental in scale and unyielding in presence: they smoke, lounge, stare outward, and celebrate themselves without apology. Working in acrylic and oil on large-format canvas, Bach uses flat, saturated colour and bold contour lines to build an instantly recognisable visual world populated by recurring motifs including snakes, kitchen cloths, flowers, jewellery, and bare skin. Series such as Schlangenakte (1984) and Kinder Küche Kunst trace the development of a practice rooted in feminist self-assertion, reclaiming the female nude from art-historical convention and returning it to the woman herself. Her sculptural output in bronze and Murano glass extends these themes into three dimensions with equal directness.

Bach's institutional recognition spans four decades. Her work is held in the Sammlung Würth and has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Würth in Schwäbisch Hall. It has been shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. In 1985 she received the Annemarie und Will Grohmann-Stipendium, presented at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

Her exhibition history reflects consistent international engagement since the late 1970s. Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982 was her international breakthrough. Major group exhibitions followed at the Guggenheim Museum (Refigured Painting, 1989), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Eva und die Zukunft, 1986), the Kunsthalle Wien (Punk is no innocence, 2002), ZKM Karlsruhe (Obsessive Malerei, 2002), Haus der Kunst Munich (Geniale Dilettanten, 2015 and 2016), the Groninger Museum (Die Neuen Wilden, 2016), and the Fonds Hélène & Édouard Leclerc in Landerneau (Libres Figurations — Années 80, 2018). Solo exhibitions have taken her work to institutions across Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States. KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presented her early works in Zwei Tage in violetten Gummistiefeln in 2018 and co-organised the two-person exhibition Input/Output — Elvira Bach and Annegret Soltau in 2020, shown at the gallery and at Museum Bensheim.

Elvira Bach continues to live and work in Berlin, and her practice remains as committed to the power and freedom of the female figure as it was when she first put brush to canvas in the late 1970s.