A. Christiane Löhr

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1965, Christiane Löhr studied Egyptology, Classical Architecture, and History at the University of Bonn. She then took art classes at the University of Mayence before enrolling in the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, where she earned her degree in 1996 under the direction of Jannis Kounellis, a leading contemporary artist and figurehead of the Arte Povera movement, a revolutionary artistic vein which defies cultural industrialisation and consumer society, and champions a return to the essence of the creative gesture, in particular through the use of so-called “poor” materials to create art.

Spotted in 2001 at the 49^th Venice Art Biennial coordinated by the late Swiss art magnate Harald Szeeman, Christiane Löhr’s international career in contemporary art has already passed the twenty-year mark. She has developed a radical treatment of sculpture over the course of solo and group exhibitions in Japan, the US, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.

On the occasion of the publication of his monograph by Hatje-Cantz in 2020, the great Italian Arte Povera specialist Germano Celant dedicated one of his final texts to her (exhibition curator at the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou, he died in April 2020).

Löhr owes this recognition to her singular and resolutely independent process, only recently acclaimed for the first time in Berlin at the exhibition Ordnung der Wildnis held at the Haus em Waldsee in 2021.

Today Christiane Löhr lives and works both in Cologne, Germany, from her studio in the heart of an industrial area suited to her work, and in Prato, Italy, where she takes advantage of her outings on foot or by bicycle to collect the materials necessary to create her sculptures.

At Chaumont-sur-Loire, she joins such masters of Arte Povera as Jannis Kounellis, whose commissioned work is still on display in the Château’s kitchens, and Giuseppe Penone, whose perennial sculpture Trattenere 8 anni di crescita converses with the Historic Grounds.

Christiane Löhr is represented by the Tucci Russo Gallery, Turin (Italy).