Gabriele Pöhlmann


Gabriele Pöhlmann (born 1957 in Nuremberg) studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 1975 to 1979, where she was the youngest student of her year in Professor Voglsamer's painting class. Early on, she consciously chose to pursue artistic practice—driven by an intense engagement with art that had its roots in her childhood. Today, she lives and works as a freelance artist in Lenggries, Upper Bavaria.

Pöhlmann understands painting as an existential space of experience. Her works emerge from an inner impulse—as an approach to questions of origin, meaning, and future. Color is not a decorative tool but an energetic carrier of feeling and consciousness. In complex pictorial spaces, perception, memory, and intuition condense into compositions that oscillate between figuration and dissolution. The visible becomes a resonance chamber for that which eludes rational clarity.

Her works have been shown in numerous institutions and exhibitions both at home and abroad, including "4 Farbwelten" (4 Color Worlds) at St. Urban Abbey (Switzerland) and presentations in Munich, Venice, and Cologne. Pöhlmann's artistic approach is characterized by a keen sensibility—by the conviction that painting is a means to look beyond the surface of appearances and to readjust perception.

Gabriele Pöhlmann

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Q&A with the artists:

The exhibition ARTIFICIAL? Traces of the Present brings together works that question our perception. Reality appears not as a given, but as something that is constantly being appropriated. ARTIFICIAL? questions whether what we see and experience is not always already made, constructed, and mediated.

1) How does your work engage with reality and its construction, and what “traces of the present” become visible in it?

Regarding the fugitive's weight

My still lifes depict everyday objects such as cola cans, strawberries or gummy bears – things of rapid consumption, familiar and seemingly insignificant.

By enlarging them, I remove them from the realm of the self-evident. The monumental makes the transient visible. Surface, brilliance, and seduction come to the fore – and at the same time, their fragility.

In the tradition of memento mori, these images remind us that even the sweet, the desirable, and the commonplace are not permanent. What remains is the moment between pleasure and decay.

2) How does your work develop from the initial idea to completion, and what role does your presentation style play in this process?


The starting point for my work is often chance encounters – moments, objects, or constellations that catch my eye and trigger the impulse to capture them artistically. I initially document these fleeting discoveries photographically.

For me, photography serves not only as documentation but also as source material: I digitally edit it and then use it as a basis for further artistic development. In a subsequent process, I transfer and transform the motif into an independent work that detaches itself from the original photograph and gives rise to a new, condensed visual reality.

Chance thus becomes the starting point of a conscious artistic process – from seeing to photographing to painting or drawing.